Urgent query - Retrospective Attendees

First of all, I would recomment you drop PMBOK and any other materials that may confuse you. I don't mean to sound fancy or authoritative, but the main material you should read is the Scrum Guide (which you'll find very easily :) ). Check this out.

Second, upon reading the Scrum Guide, you will also find out who participates in a retrospective.

Hope this helps

LE: SBOK - whatever :)

If it's only for an exam - just read only resources that provided for this exam. Information which Scrum/Kanban/Agile is the best can vary a lot.

IMO, in real life PO is not included in the scrum team but can attend to the retro (a team decides by itself, ask PO to join or not)

IMO, in real life PO is not included in the scrum team but can attend to the retro (a team decides by itself, ask PO to join or not)

That heavily depends on the setup of your team/project/development endeavour.

So far I've been on three different setups for this:

a) On my first Scrum Team, the Scrum Team was one unit, closely collaborating and co-located, including the Product Owner. Having the PO in the Retro was absolutely not a point of discussion. It just was the way it was. The PO attended every retro and provided valuable input.

b) On the second team I worked for, the PO (the person who formally held that role) was not used to working in an agile manner and neither was his organisation (the PO in this case worked at the customer's organisation). Letting the PO attend the Retrospectives, while it might have been occasionally useful, would have impacted the psychological safety of the team to a degree which would've rendered the Retrospective useless. Occasionally a joint retro with the PO and additional stakeholders took place.

c) On the team I am now part of, the PO is a respected and valued member of the team, although he too works the customer. He places great confidence and trust in the development team and vice versa. His input is considered valuable as is his abilty to clear impediments which might arise on the customer's side. The development team has the option of asking for a retro without the PO. It happens, but not too often, from what I've seen so far.

Ivan, are we learning for the sole purpose of passing an exam / becoming certified?

In real life, PO is part of the Scrum team, as long as one claims to be using Scrum. 

Regarding real life:

PO is part of the Scrum Team. That's how it is defined by the Scrum Guide. What might differ however, is how much the PO interacts with the rest of the Team. Some POs work together with the Development Team very closely with interactions every other hour. Others reduce those interactions to once a day or even less. Whatever works best with creating a valuable increment.

When it comes to Retrospective, the PO should be in the Retrospective, as it is for the whole Scrum Team, including PO. But I have to say that I've seen lots of cases where the Development Team felt to disconnected from the PO on a personal level of trust to feel really comfortable with having him in Retrospective, so the team decided to do it without PO. But of course this is not how it should be done and instead there should be discussed on how to get to that level of trust needed to openly have a Retrospective alltogether.

It is worth noting that not having the PO in the Retrospective may seriously impede the Scrum Teams ability to improve.

Here are just some examples of why that is:

* In many organisations there are impediments which can best be removed by the Product Owner

* Seeing as the PO works closely with the dev team, the things they say or do impact the team

* Issues with backlog management may be the root cause of impediments

In instances like this, a collaborative retrospective together with the Product Owner will be able to find solutions, whereas a dev-team-only retro will lead to resignation and frustration because the issues feel outside of the team's control.

The PSM-1 exam is based on what the scrum guide says.  Ignore all other references if the goal is to pass the PSM.

The attendees for a retrospective meeting are Scrum master, Development team and the Product owner as per the scrum guide.

The attendees for a retrospective meeting as per the scrum guide is Scrum master, Development team and the Product owner.

Note: Product owner is the part of scrum team.