#35 Scrum Interview Questions

Question 1

How is Scrum different from Waterfall?

Answer 1

1. Waterfall is a sequential method where one phase is followed by the other in a sequence. Scrum is more value-driven and is an agile process, which is iterative.
2. In Waterfall approach, the end-user will see the final product near the end. In Scrum, the end-user is involved at each stage of the process right from the design phase.
3. Change management is easy in the scrum, where a change can be incorporated even later in the stage without much cost. In Waterfall, making a change later in the process is very costlier and is generally not feasible.
4. Waterfall is broken into phases, usually referred to as the requirements phase, development phase, testing phase, deployment phase, etc. Scrum is broken down into sprints (usually 2 weeks) in which the planning, development, testing, and deployment happens for a set of features.

Question 2

How is scrum different from the iterative model?

Answer 2

Scrum is a type of iterative model but it’s iterative + incremental

Question 3

Do you know any other agile methodology apart from Scrum?

Answer 3

Other Agile methodology includes KanBan, XP, Lean, SAFe

Question 4

What are the scrum events?

Answer 4

There are five events in a scrum: Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective

Question 5

What are the roles in a scrum?

Answer 5

There are three main roles in a scrum: Scrum Master, Product Owner, Scrum Team.

Question 6

What do you think should be the ideal size of a Scrum team?

Answer 6

The ideal size of a scrum team is between 3 and 9 people

Question 7

What do you discuss in the daily scrum?

Answer 7

Daily scrum is timeboxed to 15 minutes and is a chance for the team to meet daily and talk about the progress on sprint backlog items. Scrum Master runs the daily scrum and every team member gets a chance to talk about their progress or issues. The usual discussion is about what I have done today and what I will do tomorrow.

Question 8

What is the ‘Time Boxing’ of a scrum process called?

Answer 8

It’s called ‘Sprint’

Question 9

What should an ideal duration of a sprint?

Answer 9

It’s recommended to have 2 – 4 weeks of the sprint cycle

Question 10

How requirements are defined in a scrum?

Answer 10

Product backlog is the single source of all requirements within a scrum

Question 11

What are the three scrum artifacts:

Answer 11

Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Product Increment.

Question 12

How do you define a user story?

Answer 12

A user story is written in a natural way to define a requirement from an end-user perspective. Scrum does not require user stories to be written at all. The requirements in a scrum are defined only by the product backlog.

Question 13

What are the roles of a Scrum Master and Product owner?

Answer 13

SM acts as a Servant Leader for the scrum team He presides over all the scrum ceremonies and coaches the team to understand and implement scrum values and principles. The scrum master is help facilitate the scrum processes and remove any impediments that will impact the delivery of the scrum team.

Scrum Master also helps the team and overall organization understand the scrum process and helps in its adoption.

PO is the point of contact for a scrum team. He/she is the one who works closest to the business. The main responsibility of a product owner is to identify and refine the product backlog items. A product owner will own, develop, and maintain the product backlog.

Question 14

How do you measure the work done in a sprint?

Answer 14

The work to be done in a sprint is defined by the velocity, which defines how many items can the team deliver. To measure progress within a sprint, a sprint burndown chart is used. A burndown show will show progress during a sprint in terms of how many user stories are pending and the number of hours left.

Question 15

What is Velocity?

Answer 15

Velocity is the sum of story points that a scrum team competes (meets the definition of done) over a sprint.

Question 16

So in the scrum, which entity is responsible for the deliverables? Scrum Master or Product Owner?

Answer 16

Neither the scrum master, not the product owner. It’s the responsibility of the scrum team who owns the deliverable.

Question 17

How do you measure the complexity or effort in a sprint? Is there a way to determine and represent it?

Answer 17

Complexity and effort are measured through “Story Points”. In Scrum, it’s recommended to use the Fibonacci series to represent it.

Question 18

How do you track your progress in a sprint?

Answer 18

The progress is tracked by a ‘Sprint Burn-Down chart’

Question 19

How do you create the Burn-Down chart?

Answer 19

Burn-down chart is a graph that shows the estimated v/s actual effort of the scrum tasks.

It is a tracking mechanism by which for a particular sprint; day to day tasks are tracked to check whether the stories are progressing towards the completion of the committed story points or not. Here, we should remember that the efforts are measured in terms of user stories points and not hours.

Question 20

What do you do in a sprint review and retrospective?

Answer 20

During Sprint review, we walk-through and demonstrate the feature or story implemented by the scrum team to the stakeholders.

During Retrospective, we try to identify collaboratively what went well, what could be done better, and action items to have continuous improvement.

Question 21

Do you see any disadvantages of using scrum?

Answer 21

I don’t see any disadvantage of using scrum. The problems mainly arise when the scrum team does not either understand the values and principles of the scrum or are not flexible enough to change.

Question 22

Do you think scrum can be implemented in all the software development processes?

Answer 22

Yes, the origin of scrum as a method was to facilitate the software development process.

Question 23

During Review, suppose the product owner or stakeholder does not agree to the feature you implemented, what would you do?

Answer 23

First thing, we will not mark the story as done.

We will first confirm the actual requirement from the stakeholder and update the user story and put it into the backlog. Based on the priority, we would be pulling the story in the next sprint.

Question 24

In case, the SM isn’t available, would you still conduct the daily stand-up meeting?

Answer 24

Yes, we can very well go ahead and do our daily stand-up meeting. This benefits the team.

Question 25

Where does automation fit into scrum?

Answer 25

Automation plays a vital role in Scrum. In order to have continuous feedback and ensure quality deliverables, we should try to implement TDD, BDD, and ATDD approaches during our development. Automation in scrum is not only related to testing, but it is for all aspects of software development.

Introducing TDD, BDD and ATDD will speed up our development process along with maintaining the quality standards; automating the build and deployment process will also speed up the feature availability in different environments – QA to production.

As far as testing is concerned, regression testing should be the one that will have the most attention. With the progress of every sprint, the regression suite keeps on increasing and it becomes practically very challenging to execute the regression suite manually for every sprint. Because we have the sprint duration of 2 – 4 weeks, automating it would be imperial.

Question 26

What is the difference between a product backlog and a sprint backlog?

Answer 26

1. Product backlog is a list of items to be completed for developing the product. A sprint backlog is the list of items to be completed within a sprint.
2. Product backlog is maintained by the product owner, but the team maintains the sprint backlog.
3. Product backlog is evolving list, but sprint backlog cannot be changed when agreed.

Question 27

Can you give an example of where scrum cannot be implemented? In that case, what do you suggest?

Answer 27

Scrum is a method that can be applied to almost all products. However, there are cases where it might not make sense to use scrum such as maintenance or BAU projects, which perform the same daily tasks every day.

Question 28

Tell me the advantages of using scrum?

Answer 28

1. Collaboration: One of the main advantages of scrum is that it increases collaboration between the teams. The various scrum events are held to continuously improve the delivery process ad enhance communication within the team
2. Early feedback: Since the stakeholders are involved at the start of the processes, there is an opportunity to get early feedback and reduce costs of change management
3. Happy people: The team decides their daily and sprint work. Everybody is regarded as equal in the team and has their own defined sets of roles and responsibilities. This leads to happy team

Question 29

What is DoD? How is this achieved?

Answer 29

DoD stands for Definition of Done. DoD is defined at the start of the project. It is achieved when:

The story is development complete
QA complete
The story meets and satisfies the acceptance criteria
Regression around the story is complete
The feature is eligible to be shipped/deployed in production.

Question 30

What is MVP in scrum?

Answer 30

A Minimum Viable Product is a product that has just the bare minimum required feature which can be demonstrated to the stakeholders and is eligible to be shipped to production.

Question 31

What are Epics?

Answer 31

Epics are generally a large piece of work or a definite product to be delivered. An epic is broken down into user stories that are measurable. An example of Epic for an eCommerce website would be: “Customer order process”.

The user stories underneath will be “Selecting a product”, “Adding to the basket”, “Making a Payment”. These can be further broken down into sub-tasks.

Question 32

How do you calculate a story point?

Answer 32

A story point is calculated by taking into consideration the development effort+ testing effort + resolving dependencies and other factors that would require to complete a story.

Question 33

Is it possible that you come across different story points for development and testing efforts? In that case, how do you resolve this conflict?

Answer 33

Yes, this is a very common scenario. There may be a chance that the story point given by the development team is, say 3 but the tester gives it 5. In that case, both the developer and tester have to justify their story point, have discussions in the meeting and collaborate to conclude a common story point.

Question 34

You are in the middle of a sprint and suddenly the product owner comes with a new requirement, what will you do?

Answer 34

A new requirement needs to be formally added to the product backlog. If a high-priority requirement comes in, it is discussed during the daily scrum and added to the current sprint planning. That might mean that some other sprint items need to be moved to the next sprint.

Question 35

In case you receive a story in the last day of the sprint to test and you find there are defects, what will you do? Will you mark the story as done?

Answer 35

The DoD (definition of done) is defined at the onset of the product journey. A story is done only when it is development complete + QA complete + acceptance criteria is met + it is eligible to be released into production. In this case, if there are defects, the story is partially done and not completely done, so I will spill it over to the next sprint.