Top 20 Agile Scrum Interview Questions For Your Big Breakthrough In 2020

Look at the world around yourself once.

Can you find any organization that is not adopting Agile nowadays?

Hardly. Isn’t it?

Since the time Agile and Scrum started working hand in hand, not only they changed the concept of a workspace completely but also bred new job roles that can pay an individual enough. Scrum Developer, Scrum Master, Scrum product owner-each and every job role comes with a huge responsibility and is equally important for the Scrum team. As much as their demand is increasing in every job industry, the job interviews are getting tougher day by day as well. As we mentioned in our “Do you have these 5 scrum master qualities?” blog, If you want to be a Scrum Master, you must have some specific qualities like influence over a team, an Agile personality, understanding of the Scrum concept, etc. Being an Agile Product Owner too demands a different set of skills as mentioned in the “5 things you need to know to become an Agile Product Owner” blog. But one thing remains constant in all the Agile Scrum job roles. At the interview table, when you are facing a bunch of questions, the interviewer’s interest will be focused on whether or not you have good knowledge of Agile and Scrum. 

How they do that you may wonder?

In this blog, we are displaying the 20 Agile and Scrum interview questions interviewers are more likely to ask. Hope this will help your preparations!

1. What is the duration of a scrum sprint?

Answer: A scrum script takes 3-4 weeks to complete. On average, the duration of a scrum sprint is 4 weeks. 

2. What is Velocity?

Answer: Velocity is the rate at which the team progresses sprint by sprint. 

3. What do you know about impediments in Scrum? Give some examples of impediments.

Answer: Impediments are the obstacles or issues faced by the scrum team which slow down their speed of work. If something is trying to block the scrum team from reaching their goal then it is an impediment. Impediments can come in any form. Some of the impediments are:

Resource missing or sick team member

Technical, operational, organizational problems

Lack of management supportive system

Business problems

External issues such as weather, war etc

Lack of skill or knowledge

 

4. What is the difference and similarity between Agile and Scrum?

Answer: Agile is a methodology used for project management.

On the other hand, Scrum is just a form of Agile that describes the process and its steps more concisely. 

Agile and Scrum both involve completing projects in steps or incrementally and is iterative in nature. 

5. What is the increment? Explain.

Answer: An increment is the total of all the product backlogs items completed during a sprint. Each increment includes all the previous sprint increment values as it is cumulative. It must be in the available mode in the subsequent release as it is a step to reach your goal.

6. What is “build-breaker”?

Answer: The build-breaker is a situation that arises when there is a bug in the software. Due to this sudden unexpected bug, the compilation process stops or execution fails or a warning is generated. The responsibility of the tester is then to get the software back to the normal working stage removing the bug.

7. What do you know about the Scrum ban?

Answer: Scrum-ban is a Scrum and Kanban-based model for software development. This model is specifically used for the projects that need continuous maintenance, have various programming errors or have some sudden changes. This model promotes the completion of a project in minimum time for a programming error or user story.

8. Do you know about Agile Manifesto & its Principles? Explain in brief.

Answer: Agile Manifesto is based on 4 values:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working Software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to Change over following a plan

Agile Manifesto is based on 12 principles:

Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Welcome changing requirements, even in late development.

Deliver working software frequently (weeks rather than months)

Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers

Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted

A face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)

Working software is the primary measure of progress

Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace

Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design

Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential

Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams

Regularly, the team reflects on how to become more effective and adjusts accordingly

 

9. What is the use of burn-up and burn-down charts?

Answer: The burn-up chart illustrates the amount of completed work in a project whereas the burn-down chart depicts the amount of work remained to complete a project. Thus, the burn-up and burn-down charts are used to trace the progress of a project.

10. Define Zero Sprint and Spike in Agile.

Answer:  Zero Sprint can be defined as the preparation step of the first sprint in Agile. 

Spike is the type of story that can be taken between the sprints. Spikes are commonly used for the activities related to the design or technical issues such as research, design, prototyping, and exploration.

11. What is the role of the Scrum Master?

Answer: The scrum master’s responsibilities are as follows:

Serving and protecting his team from any kind of distractions that could affect their performance. 

Motivating the team to achieve the sprint goal. 

Building a self-organized and motivated team where each member is familiar with the implementation of Agile and Scrum principles and applications. 

Keeping a proper check on the scrum team if they are executing committed tasks properly. 

Increasing the efficiency and productivity of the team so that they can achieve the sprint goal effectively.

12. What do you know about a story point in Scrum?

Answer: A story point in Scrum is the unit for the estimation of total efforts that are required to perform or complete a particular task. 

13. What is the role of Sashimi in Scrum methodology?

Answer: Sashimi is a technique used by Scrum to check the completion of all the functions created by the developers. Using this technique, all the requirements such as analysis, designing, coding, testing and documentation that are used in the constitution of a product are checked and only after that the product is displayed.

14. What are the different roles in Scrum?

Ans. The three scrum roles are:

Scrum Master

Product Owner 

Scrum Team 

 

15. What are the responsibilities of a Scrum Master?

Answer: The key responsibilities of a Scrum Master includes:

Tracking and monitoring

Understanding requirements properly

Work to reach the project goal

Process checking master and quality master

Protect the team from detachments

Improving the performance of the team

Lead the meetings and resolve issues

Resolution of conflicts and impediments

Communication and reporting

16. What are the different ceremonies in Scrum?

Ans. The different scrum ceremonies are:

Scrum planning

Scrum  Daily stand up

Scrum review 

Scrum retrospective 

17. What do you understand by the term Agile testing?

Answer: Agile testing is a software testing practice that is fully based on the agile principles of software development. It is an iterative methodology where the requirements are the outcome of the collaboration between the product owner and team. The agile principles and applications are applied to Agile testing to meet the customer requirements by successful completion of the project.

18. State some major principles of Agile testing.

Answer: Some major principles of Agile testing are mentioned below:

Customer satisfaction

Face to face communication

Sustainable development

Quick respond to changes

Continuous feedback

Successive improvement

Self-organized

Focus on essence

Error-free clean node

Collective work

19. What are the skills of a good Agile Tester?

Answer: Agile tester is the one who implements agile software development principles for software testing. The skills of a good agile tester should possess are:

Required to be familiar with the concepts and principles of Agile

Should have excellent communication skills to communicate with the team and the clients

Ability to set priority for the tasks according to the requirements

Should be able to understand the requirements properly

Understanding of the risks involved with a project due to changing requirements

20. Is there any drawbacks of the Agile model? If yes, explain.

Answer: Few drawbacks of the Agile model are:

It is not easy to make a prediction about the effort required to complete a task. It becomes more problematic in the case of large projects as it becomes difficult to get an idea of the total effort required.

At sometimes, it’s not possible to properly focus on the design and documentation of the project

In case the requirements of the client are not understood properly, the final project will not meet the customer requirements. 

Only the leader who has considerable experience in Agile methodologies is capable to take important decisions. The team members with little or no experience are not involved in decision-making.

Conclusion:

From these Agile Scrum interview questions, you must have understood by now that if you have an in-depth knowledge of Agile and Scrum, nothing can stop you to crack the interviews. The average salary a Scrum Master gets in India is Rs 1,230,371 per annum. And, if you have proper experience in the same field. That can even go up to 1 Million! A scrum product owner ends up getting on Rs 1,443,653 annually on average. It can go to 2 Million as well, depending on the different industries. So, what do you think? Can you make your next Scrum interview your grand breakthrough with these sneak peek of interview questions? If you think you need more, You can join our training sessions for the Agile Product Owner and Agile Scrum Master. As a bonus, you’ll get an accredited certification as well that will automatically rank up your CV. Feeling like taking up our sessions? Great! We hope to see you on our next session then!

 

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