Agile Scrum Master Interview Questions and Answers

Agile Scrum Master Interview Questions and Answers

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Best Agile Scrum Master Interview Questions and Answers

Are you one among those who wish to start their journey in the Agile Project Management domain and aspiring to get into your dream job? Well, you have arrived at the right place! Scrum has acquired a prominent place in the Agile project management framework segment because of its unparalleled features such as simplicity and high-performance power. This blog has been designed to simplify your Agile Scrum Master interview preparation process.  It’s a challenging task to find all the frequently asked Agile Scrum Master interview questions at one place. To eliminate this issue and help the Scrum master job aspirants we have gathered all top Agile Scrum Master Interview Questions and Answers here.  

Top Agile Scrum Master Interview Questions and Answers

Scrum is a popular Agile project management framework and Scrum Master plays a leadership role in coordinating the teams and helps in achieving the desired results by applying agile principles.  Scrum Master is responsible to guide and educate non-scrum teams and coordinate with them to make the project successful. CourseJet offers you a list of frequently asked Scrum Master interview questions and answers, which have helped thousands of students and professionals in clearing their Scrum master interview and achieving their dream job. Organizations across the world are preferring to follow agile methodologies in order to bring the products or service to the market within a short span of time. This has transformed the face of software development and creating more employment opportunities in this field. This blog covers all the Scrum interview questions and answers suitable for beginners as well as for experienced.

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frequently Asked Scrum Master Interview Questions and Answers

All these frequently asked Agile Scrum Master interview questions and answers are presented here based on the opinions of Agile industry experts. This blog covers the questions related to the areas such as Scrum lifecycle, Scrum team, agile development methodologies, Agile project set up, and much more.  Preparing these agile scrum master interview questions are also helpful for experienced candidates like software developers, software testers, architects, product managers, product owners, team leads, etc.  By the end of this Agile Scrum Master interview questions for beginners will definitely help you in clearing your Scrum master interview in the very first attempt. Without wasting much time let’s get into the top Agile Scrum Master interview questions and answers section. 

To make your Agile Scrum Master interview preparation a way simpler and easy we have listed below all the interview questions from basic level to advanced level to gain expertise in all the concepts of Agile Scrum Master. Now let’s get into the questions and answers part.

Scrum is a popular Agile framework that helps the organizational teams to work together. Using Scrum, organizational teams can learn from their experiences and determine how to deal with the problems, failures, victories, and contribute to the growth of the company.

Following are the 3 roles available in Scrum: 

Product Owner: The Product owner is an authorized person who takes the responsibility to improve the ROI by analyzing product features, making these features into a list, focusing on the betterment of the product, and much more. 

Scrum Master: This candidate will help the team to master Scrum and apply scrum methodology to bring optimum business growth. This individual eliminates the shields, impediments, team distractions, and helps them in using agile practices.   

Scrum Team: This is nothing but a group of people who works relentlessly in order to fulfill the requirements of stakeholders.  

A Scrum team is a self-organized one and consists of 5 to 7 members. Following are the responsibilities of a Scrum team: 

  • The assigned products should be developed and delivered at each sprint. 
  • Transparency and ownership should be ensured for the work assigned to the candidates.
  • The appropriate and best information to be presented in order to make the daily Scrum meeting successful.
  • Candidates must collaborate with the team.

Following are the three Artifacts associated with the Scrum process: 

Product Backlog: This artifact contains things such as new features, infrastructure modifications, bug fixes, and many other tasks in order to get the desired output.

Sprint Backlog: This is also called as a subset of the product backlog which consists of the activities needed to be completed in order to fulfill the sprint goal.  The first thing the team does is identifying the tasks that need to be completed from the product backlog. Finally, these tasks are added to the sprint backlog.

Product Increment: This artifact is a collection of all the completed product backlog items in a sprint and also the value of last sprint increments. Here the output should be in usable condition, even before the product owner releases it.  

Impediments are the roadblocks or problems faced by scrum teams that slow down the output.  Whatever the thing that is trying to trouble the Scrum team from achieving the goal is defined as an impediment.  There are different types of impediments and some of them are: 

  • Organizational, operational, or technical problems 
  • A sick team member or resource missing 
  • Inefficient management support system 
  • External issues such as war, weather, change in govt policies, etc. 
  • Business problems
  • Lack of skills or knowledge 

The build-breaker is defined as a situation that prevails if there is a bug in the software. This bug creates multiple issues such as, stops the compilation process, a warning is generated, or execution fails.  Now the Software tester is responsible for fixing the bug as soon as possible and bringing the normal working stage.   

The Daily Stand-up is a regular meeting most probably that is held in the morning session. This meeting is generally held for answering the following three questions: 

  • On what tasks each individual worked yesterday? 
  • What work will be done today? 
  • Is there any roadblock that is lagging you behind from performing your task? 

The Stand-up meeting plays an important role in achieving the long-term goal by motivating and identifying the team’s strengths and weaknesses. 

It is a Scrum and Kabana model used for the software development purpose. This Scrum-ban model is particularly used for projects that consist of various programming errors, need continuous monitoring, or require sudden changes. The main motive of this model is to complete projects within a limited time period. 

Following are the Agile quality strategies: 

  • Iteration
  • Dynamic code analysis
  • Re-factoring
  • Reviews and inspection
  • Short feedback cycles
  • Milestone reviews
  • Standards and guidelines

These are the charts that give us an overview of the project work status. The burn-up chart shows the completed work in a project whereas a burn-down chart shows the pending work needed to work on in order to complete the project.  

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Zero sprints: This is nothing but a preparation step of a vert first sprint in the agile. In a project, there are some tasks that are required to be executed even before the project starts. All these activities are treated as Zero sprints and the best examples for such tasks are development environment setup, backlog preparation, etc.  

Spike: This is defined as a story that can be applied between the sprints. Spikes are generally applied for the tasks related to design or technical problems such as exploration, prototyping, and research. We have two different types of Spikes here which are technical spikes and functional spikes.                

A story point in Scrum is nothing but a unit that is used to estimate the efforts required to complete a specific task. 

Sashimi occupied an important palace in Scrum methodology. This is a popular technique used by Scrum to check the work status of the functions created by developers. This Technique also helps in checking with the requirements such as designing, analysis, testing, coding, and documentation.

Following are the key responsibilities of a Scrum master: 

  • Having a clear idea of requirements 
  • Monitoring and tracking 
  • Find easy ways to reach project goals 
  • Handle the team from detachments 
  • Resolving issues 
  • Conduct and lead the meetings 
  • Providing solutions to conflicts and impediments
  • Communicating and reporting.

Agile testing is also similar to other software testing but works based on the agile principles of software development. It is an interactive process in which the outcome is defined as the collaboration between the team and the product owner.  

Following are the important principles of Agile testing: 

  • Customer satisfaction
  • Sustainable development
  • Direct communication 
  • Successive improvement
  • Continuous feedback
  • Focus on essence
  • Self-organized
  • Collective work
  • Error-free clean node 

Following are the other agile frameworks: 

  • Kanban
  • Test-Driven Development
  • Feature Driven Development

This term is widely used in scaled agile technologies, and helpful in collaboration and control of several scrum teams. This is best suitable where the problem is complex and team collaboration is required. The term Scrum of Scrums is also used to ensure that the project has met the standards such as transparency, adaption, collaboration, and to make sure the products are deployed and delivered. 

User-story mapping helps in arranging the user stories that are used for understanding the system backlog, system functionalities, providing value to users, and planning releases. The user stories are arranged in a horizontal way based on their priority. And the vertical axis is used for displaying the increasing sophistication levels.  

The sprint retrospective is conducted after the completion of the sprint review. In this sprint retrospective, stage teams will discuss things like past mistakes, present issues, and the latest strategies to handle them. The entire information is taken into consideration while planning the new Sprint.    

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Following are some of the drawbacks associated with Scrum: 

  • Individuals require huge experience. 
  • Team collaboration and commitment is essential for ensuring results. 
  • An inexperienced candidate can cause the failure of the project.  
  • It is best suitable for smaller projects and very difficult to scale larger projects. 
  • Strong fundamental knowledge of Scrum concepts
  • Best organizational skills
  • Knowledge of the technologies used in the organization 
  • Ability to handle team conflicts 
  • Have the ability to motivate and train the team on the Scrum practices 
  • Be the leader 
  • This is a major word used in Scrum and used for describing a time-boxed iteration.  
  • A sprint is intended for developing a feature or module of a product
  • The typical duration of a sprint varies between a week or two. 

The word velocity is used in Scrum to measure the amount of work done by a team during a sprint. It is also used to state the number of user stories finished in a sprint. 

The responsibilities of a product owner are listed below: 

  • Define project vision
  • Identify customer needs and plan & build suitable user stories. 
  • Analyze project progress
  • Acts as a spokesperson to handle product related questions. 

Generally, the duration of a scrum sprint depends on the project’s size plus the team working on it. The team size may differ from 3-9 members. In general, a scrum script finishes in 3-4 weeks. Therefore, on average, the duration of a scrum sprint, which is also called a scrum cycle, is four weeks. 

This is one of the regularly asked agile scrum interview questions; a quick answer can also be delivered this way. An increment is the whole of all the product backlog items completed throughout a sprint. Each increment involves all the past sprint increment values as it is combined. It must be in the available mode within the subsequent release as it is a step to reach your aim.

This is the theory that most agile/scrum roles aspirants must be on tips. Four manifesto values plus 12 principles should be explained as much as possible as part of this question. Even if it’s not explained in a 100% accurate manner, it is fine, but purposes of values and principles should come out e.g.

  • Working Software must be demonstrated at regular intervals.
  • Individuals and interaction – self-motivating, self-organization must be encouraged.
  • Customer collaboration.
  • Welcoming change at any point in time within the project.

With the guidance of a particular cumulative flow diagram, an inspection is carried out over the uniform workflow process. In this cumulative flow graph/diagram, the x-axis signifies time, whereas the y-axis represents the number of efforts.

Work category allocation is an essential factor that gives prompt data of the time investment that is where the time is being spent, which task should be granted priority as a factor of time.

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Time coverage is the time that is given to a code while testing. It is measured in percentage as a factor of the number of code lines described by the test suite plus the total number of relevant lines of code.

Business value delivered is a term that indicates the working effectiveness of the team. The business objectives are assigned numerical values 1,2,3.. and so on, as per the level of complexity, priority, plus ROI.

The defect removal awareness is the factor that supports the team to accouche a quality product. The classification of an active quantity of defects, awareness, and removal plays an essential role in producing a high-quality product.

Defect resolution time is a method within which the team members recognize the defects (bugs) plus set a preference for the defect resolution. The procedure of making errors/bugs or defect resolution contains various processes like schedule defect fixation, clearing the picture of the defect, finishing defect fixation, handling of resolution report, and generation.

The sprint burndown chart means a graph to describe the amount of non-implemented or implemented sprints through a Scrum cycle. This matric serves to follow the work completed with the sprint.

  • Crystal methodologies 
  • Dynamic development
  • Lean software development
  • Feature-driven development 

A sprint planning meeting is a meeting within which all the key Scrum roles (scrum team, product owner, and scrum master) have a conversation regarding the team’s preference features and product backlog items are known sprint planning meetings. This meeting is held every week and also lasts for approximately 1 hour.

A sprint retrospective meeting is a  meeting within which all the Scrum roles (product owner, scrum master, and scrum team) have a conversation about the bad part of the sprint, the good part of the sprint. Also, the sprint improvements are identified as a sprint retrospective meeting. This meeting is held at the sprint review meeting or else at the end of the sprint; it remains for 2-3 hours.

The product backlog is a list that consists of changes to features, new features, bug fixes, changes to the infrastructure, plus other activities to guarantee an appropriate output can be obtained.

The sprint backlog means a subset of the product backlog that includes tasks concentrated on by the team to accomplish the sprint goal. Teams first distinguish the tasks to be completed from the product backlog. Those are then affixed to the sprint backlog.

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The product increment is an aggregate of all product backlog items developed within a sprint and the value of early sprints’ increments. The output must be in serviceable condition, even if the product owner does not release it.

The scrum master tracks the sprint progress in the following way.

  • Scrum retrospectives
  • Sprint planning
  • Daily scrum meetings
  • Sprint burndown
  • Escaped defects
  • Defect density
  • Team velocity

Minimum viable product (MVP) is a Lean Startup theory that emphasizes learning while making product development. This enables one to test plus understand the idea by getting displayed to the original variant for target customers and users. To achieve this, one has to accumulate all the vital data and also learn from that collected data. The thought behind MVP is to deliver the product, give access to the users, and perceive how the product is utilized, perceived, and understood. This will also give more penetration into the customers’ or users’ needs.

The MMP (Minimal Marketable Product) applies to the product classification, which will have a minimum number of features that address the necessity of the users. The MMP would also help the business to reduce the time to market.

We can define the user stories in the format of

As a <User / type of user>
I want to <action/feature to implement>
So that < objective>
With this, we have come to the end of this Agile Scrum Master interview questions blog. Preparing these questions thoroughly will help you with the required knowledge and simplify your way in clearing the interview with ease. We also add the latest Agile Scrum master interview questions to this blog so, stay tuned. Happy learning!

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