If you must ask, you’re not doing Scrum. If they were optional, why would you have them at all? If you’re too busy to attend, you’re not a team working on a scrum, you’re an individual fighting on your own. Too many times, early in the formation of a team when I would be unable …
NO Period Stick to your “contract” to perform a certain amount of work in a certain period of time and, as Scrum Master (not the team!), work with senior managers or others to find another way to deal with an “emergency”. In over six years of leading agile projects using Scrum, I have never stopped …