True or False: Multiple Scrum Teams working on the same product must have the same Sprint start date.

The Scrum Guide does not mandate that multiple Scrum Teams working on the same product must have the same Sprint start date. While aligning Sprints is a highly recommended practice to facilitate the integration of work into a single, valuable Increment each Sprint, it is not a formal rule within the core Scrum framework. The Scrum Guide is intentionally non-prescriptive on this point, allowing teams to determine the best approach for their context. Specific scaling frameworks built upon Scrum, such as Nexus, do enforce this rule to manage dependencies and integration, but it is not a requirement of Scrum itself.

A. True: This is incorrect because the Scrum Guide, the definitive source for Scrum, does not contain this rule. It is a common practice, not a mandatory requirement.

1. Schwaber

K.

& Sutherland

J. (2020). The Scrum Guide. Scrum.org.

Reference Point: The guide details the rules of Scrum. The requirement for synchronized Sprint start dates for multiple teams is notably absent. The guide states

"The entire Scrum Team is accountable for creating a valuable

useful Increment every Sprint

" but does not prescribe how multiple teams must align their cadences to achieve this. The absence of this rule in the definitive guide is the primary evidence.

2. Scrum.org. (2021). The Nexus Guide.

Reference Point: Section "The Nexus Sprint

" Page 7. The guide for scaling Scrum with multiple teams explicitly states: "All Scrum Teams within a Nexus work from a single Product Backlog. They have Sprints of the same length that begin and end on the same day." This highlights that while cadence synchronization is a rule in a specific scaling framework

it is not a rule of the base Scrum framework itself.