Scrum Interview Questions

1. What is Scrum?

Scrum Interview Questions : Scrum is an Agile framework that can help teams work together. Scrum can enable teams to learn from experiences, self-organize while working on problems, to reflect on their victories and failures, to make improvements. This Agile Scrum interview question is often used as a starter question to get the interview moving. 

2. Define the roles in Scrum?

• Product Owner: The product owner is an individual who is responsible for increasing the ROI by determining product features, prioritizing these features into a list, what needs to be focused on the upcoming sprint, and much more. These are constantly re-prioritized and refined.
• Scrum Master: This individual helps the team in learning to apply Scrum to ensure optimum business value. The scrum master removes impediments, shields the team from distractions, and enables them to adopt agile practices.
• Scrum Team: They are a collection of individuals who work together to ensure that the requirements of the stakeholders are delivered.

3. What are the responsibilities of the Scrum Team?

The Scrum Team is one that’s self-organizing and involves five to seven members. The following are their responsibilities:

• Working products must be developed and delivered during each sprint.
• Ownership and transparency must be ensured for the work assigned to the team members.
• Correct and crisp information must be provided to ensure a successful daily scrum meeting.
• They must collaborate with the team and themselves.

4. Differentiate Between Agile and Scrum.

The difference between Agile and Scrum is a very fundamental and common Agile Scrum interview question asked in an interview.

5. What are the Artifacts of the Scrum Process?

• Product Backlog: It is a list that consists of new features, changes to features, bug fixes, changes to the infrastructure, and other activities to ensure a particular output can be obtained.
• Sprint Backlog: It is a subset of the product backlog that contains tasks focused on by the team to satisfy the sprint goal. Teams first identify the tasks to be completed from the product backlog. These are then added to the sprint backlog.
• Product Increment: It is a combination of all product backlog items completed in a sprint and the value of previous sprints’ increments. The output must be in usable condition, even if the product owner doesn’t release it.

6. How are the Product and Sprint Backlog different from One Another?

7. Who is a Scrum Master? And what does he/she do?

A Scrum Master is someone who promotes and supports the usage of Scrum within the team.

• He/She understands the theory, practices, rules and, values of Scrum
• He/She ensures that the team follows the values, principles and, practices of Scrum
• They remove any distractions and impediments that hamper the progress of the project
• The Scrum Master ensures that the team delivers value during the sprint

8. What happens in Daily Stand-up sessions?

Stand-up sessions are daily discussions that take place and are usually 15 minutes long. Daily Stand-up sessions help understand:

• What tasks went well
• What tasks were completed 
• What tasks are pending, and
• The obstacles the team is facing

The meeting helps in understanding the overall scope and status of the project. Further discussions can take place after the stand-up sessions.

9. What is Scrum-ban?

• Scrum-ban is a methodology that’s a combination of Scrum and Kanban. Scrum-ban can be used to meet the needs of the team, and to minimize the batching of work, and to adopt a pull-based system.
• It ingeniously includes the structure of Scrum and the flexibility and visualization of Kanban.

10. What is Sprint 0 and Spike?

• Sprint 0 refers to the small amount of effort put in to create a rough skeleton of the product backlog. It also includes insights towards estimating the release of products. Sprint 0 is required for: 
  • Creating the project skeleton, along with research spikes
  • Keeping minimal design
  • Developing some stories completely
  • Having low velocity and being lightweight
• The spike is a set of activities that involve Extreme Programming (XP) for research, design, investigation, creating POCs, etc.
• The spike aims to reduce risks of the technical approach, helping gain knowledge to better understand requirements and improve reliability

11. What is ‘Scrum of Scrums’?

• It is a terminology used for scaled agile technologies, which is required to control and collaborate with multiple scrum teams. It is best used in situations where teams are collaborating on complex assignments. 
• It is also used to ensure that the required transparency, collaboration, adaption, and adoption are established and to ensure that the products are deployed and delivered. 

12. What is User-Story Mapping?

• User story mapping represents and arranges user stories that help with understanding system functionalities, system backlog, planning releases, and providing value to customers.
• They arrange user stories based on their priority on the horizontal axis. On the vertical axis, they are represented based on the increasing levels of sophistication.

13. What happens in a Sprint Retrospective?

The sprint retrospective takes place after the sprint review. During this meeting, past mistakes, potential issues, and new methods to handle them are discussed. This data is incorporated into the planning of a new sprint.

14. What is Empirical Process Control in Scrum?

• Empiricism refers to work that’s based on facts, experiences, evidence, observations, and experimentation. It is established and followed in Scrum to ensure project progress and interpretation is based on facts of observations.
• It relies on transparency, observation, and adaption.
• The mindset of the team and the shift in thought process and culture are essential to achieve the agility required by the organization.

15. What are Some drawbacks to using Scrum?

• Scrum requires individuals with experience
• Teams need to be collaborative and committed to ensuring results
• A scrum master with lesser experience can cause the collapse of the project
• Tasks need to be well defined, lest the project has many inaccuracies
• It works better for smaller projects and is difficult to scale to larger, more complex projects

16. What are the key skills of a Scrum Master?

• A strong understanding of Scrum and Agile concepts
• Fine-tuned organizational skills
• Familiarity with the technology used by the team
• To be able to coach and teach the team to follow Scrum practices
• Having the ability to handle conflicts and resolve them quickly
• To be a servant leader

17. How can discord be dealt with within the Scrum Team?

• The issue’s root cause needs to be identified and addressed
• Complete ownership needs to be established
• Try to diffuse the disagreement
• Emphasize on focus areas that complement the project
• A common understanding needs to be established to guide the team
• Performing continuous monitoring and providing complete visibility

18. What is a User Story?

• A user story is an agile software development/ project management tool that provides teams with simple, natural language explanations of one or more features of the project that’s written from the perspective of the end-user.
• The user story doesn’t go into detail but only mentions how certain types of work will bring value to the end-user. The end-user, in this case, could be an external component or an internal customer/colleague within the organization.
• They also form the building block of agile frameworks like epics and other initiatives.
• They ensure that the teams work towards the goals of the organization, with the help of epics and initiatives.
• The requirements to make a user story a reality are added later, after discussions with the team.
• They are recorded on post-it notes, index cards, or project management software.

19. How are user stories, epics, and tasks different?

• User Stories: They provide the team with simple explanations of the business’ requirements created from the end user’s perspective.  
• Epics: An epic is a collection of related user stories. They are usually large and complex.
• Tasks: Tasks are used to break down user stories further. They’re the smallest unit in Scrum that is used to track work. A person or a team of two people usually work on a task.

20. What is a Sprint?

• Sprint is a terminology used in Scrum, used to describe a time-boxed iteration.
• During a sprint, a specific module or feature of the product is created.
• The duration of a sprint can vary between a week or two.

21. What is Velocity?

Velocity is a metric used to measure the amount of work completed by a team during a sprint. It refers to the number of user stories completed in a sprint. 

22. What are the responsibilities of a Product Owner?

• Defines the vision for the project
• Anticipates the needs of the customer and creates appropriate user stories
• Evaluates project progress
• Acts as a liaison for all product-related questions

23. What is a Burnup and Burndown Chart?

• A burnup chart is a tool that’s used to track the amount of work that’s been completed and to represent the total amount of work that needs to be done for a sprint/project.
• A burndown chart represents how fast working through user stories is. It shows total effort against the amount of work for each iteration.

24. How is Estimation Done in a Scrum Project?

• The estimation of user stories is done based on their difficulty 
• A particular scale is used to assess the difficulty of the user stories. Some type of scales are: 
  • Numeric Sizing (1 – 10)
  • T-shirt Sizes (S, M, L, XL…)
  • Fibonacci Series (1, 2, 3, 5, 8…)
  • Dog breeds (Great Dane, Chihuahua…)

25. What are some risks in Scrum? How are they handled?

Some types of risks in Scrum are:

• Budget: The risk of exceeding budgets
• People (team): Team members need to be of appropriate skill and capability
• Sprint (duration and deliverables): Exceeding the duration, addition of  the scope of work
• Product (user stories, epics): Having ill-defined user stories and epics
• Knowledge and capability: Having the appropriate resources 

Managing risks involves identifying, assessing, analyzing, defining, and implementing risk responses, monitoring, and managing them. These are done on a continual basis right from the starting of the project until completion. It is essential to understand that the impact of the risk is based on the proximity of the actual occurrence of the risk.

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