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Your Agile team uses ideal hours to estimate tasks during sprint planning. A stakeholder reviewing the sprint backlog notices that a user story estimated at 12 ideal hours is still not complete after 3 working days, and raises concerns about team efficiency. The Product Owner starts pushing the team to tighten estimates to match actual delivery timelines.
In the last retrospective, developers mentioned that context switching, support duties, and pair programming consume significant time daily, and that ideal hour estimates don’t reflect these realities. However, the team believes ideal time still helps break down work clearly and plan better.
As the Scrum Master, what is the best response?
A. Stop using ideal hours and move fully to story point estimation
B. Ask developers to include buffer time in their ideal hour estimates
C. Facilitate a discussion on recalibrating expectations around ideal time
D. Ask the Product Owner to track developer output against ideal hours✅ Correct Answer: C. Facilitate a discussion on recalibrating expectations around ideal time
🔍 Explanation:
A. Stop using ideal hours and move fully to story point estimation
❌ Too reactive.
Story points are useful, but abandoning ideal hours without addressing the underlying misalignment with stakeholders won’t solve the real problem—misunderstood expectations.B. Ask developers to include buffer time in their ideal hour estimates
❌ Anti-Agile.
Padding estimates hides reality and encourages overestimation. Agile promotes transparency and continuous improvement, not concealment.C. Facilitate a discussion on recalibrating expectations around ideal time
✅ Correct.
As Scrum Master, your role is to coach both the team and stakeholders. Facilitating this discussion helps everyone understand that ideal time ≠ real calendar time, and that factors like interruptions and support tasks must be considered in planning and velocity tracking, not in each task estimate.D. Ask the Product Owner to track developer output against ideal hours
❌ Misuse of metrics.
Tracking individuals’ output violates Agile principles of team ownership and may lead to blame culture or micromanagement.Tips/Tricks/Cheatsheet to master PMP/ACP Exam and Concepts : Youtube Channel
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