List of most Frequently Asked Scrum Interview Questions with detailed answers to help you in interview preparation:
Here are some of the interview questions and their answers which are generally asked while interviewing a candidate who claims to know Agile scrum methodology.
Also, read => 25 Best Agile Testing Interview Questions and Answers
Before jumping into the agile scrum methodology interview questions answers, I would recommend you all to first go through the question and try to answer at your own and once you are done, move on to view the answers.
Hence in this paper, I have first written only the question so that you all have room to think of the answers. Then in the latter part of the paper, I have written down the answers.
Also, I would like to mention here that there are many scenarios that cannot have the right answer or a wrong answer. It only depends upon the organization’s culture and one’s perspective of resolving the situation.
So, here are the questions:
Must read => Getting Started with Agile Scrum Methodology
What You Will Learn:
Scrum Interview Questions (Scroll down for Answers)
Q #1. How is scrum different from waterfall?
Q #2. How is scrum different from the Iterative model?
Q #3. Do you know any other agile methodology apart from Scrum?
Q #4. What are the scrum events?
Q #5. What are the roles in a scrum?
Q #6. What do you think should be the ideal size of a Scrum team?
Q #7. What do you discuss in the daily Scrum?
Q #8. What is the “Time Boxing” of a scrum process called?
Q #9. What should be an ideal duration of a sprint?
Q #10. How requirements are defined in a scrum?
Q #11. What are the different artifacts in scrum?
Q #12. How do you define a user story?
Q #13. What are the roles of a Scrum Master and Product owner?
Q #14. How do you measure the work done in a sprint?
Q #15. What is Velocity?
Q #16. So in the scrum, which entity is responsible for the deliverables? Scrum Master or Product Owner?
Q #17. How do you measure the complexity or effort in a sprint? Is there a way to determine and represent it?
Q #18. How do you track your progress in a sprint?
Q #19. How do you create the Burn-Down chart?
Q #20. What do you do in a sprint review and retrospective?
Q #21. Do you see any disadvantages of using scrum?
Q #22. Do you think scrum can be implemented in all the software development processes?
Q #23. During Review, suppose the product owner or stakeholder does not agree to the feature you implemented what would you do?
Q #24. In case, the scrum master is not available, would you still conduct the daily stand-up meeting?
Q #25. Where does automation fit into scrum?
Q #26. What is the difference between a product backlog and a sprint backlog?
Q #27. Can you give an example of where scrum cannot be implemented? In that case, what do you suggest?
Q #28. Tell me the advantages of using scrum?
Q #29. What is DoD? How is this achieved?
Q #30. What is MVP in scrum?
Q #31. What are Epics?
Q #32. How do you calculate a story point?
Q #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?
Q #34. You are in the middle of a sprint and suddenly the product owner comes with a new requirement, what will you do?
Q #35. In case you receive a story on 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?
Now here are the answers to the questions:
Scrum Interview Questions And Answers
Q #1) How is scrum different from waterfall?
Answer: Scrum and Waterfall are quite different. They are two different methodologies that can be used to deliver any particular project.
Following are the major differences between them:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Q #2) How is scrum different from the Iterative model?
Answer: Scrum is a type of iterative model but it is iterative + incremental.
Q #3) Do you know any other agile methodology apart from Scrum?
Answer: Other Agile methodology includes KanBan, XP, Lean, SAFe.
Q #4) What are the scrum events?
Answer: There are five events in a scrum:
- Sprint Planning: This event happens at the start of the sprint where the scrum team discusses the items in the product backlog and decides which ones will form part of the current sprint. The deliverable of the sprint planning meeting is the sprint backlog.
- Daily Scrum: Daily scrum is timeboxed to 15 minutes and is held usually at the start of the day. In the daily scrum, the scrum team discusses the sprint backlog items to understand their progress or any issues/blockers that need to be resolved.
- Sprint: The sprint itself is the duration in which all the sprint backlog items are delivered. This is usually 2 weeks but can be a month.
- Sprint Review: Sprint review is held at the end of the sprint where the team reviews the product with the stakeholders. The sprint review is a maximum of 4 hours.
- Sprint Retrospective: This meeting reviews the last sprint to answer questions: What went well and what could be improved and then develops a plan to improve. The sprint retrospective is generally 1 hour to 3 hours.
Q #5) What are the roles in a scrum?
Answer: There are 3 main roles in a scrum:
- Scrum Master: Helps facilitate the scrum process and events
- Product Owner: Maintains the product backlog and is the interface between the scrum team and the end-user.
- Scrum Team: Self-organising and self-sufficient team to deliver the sprint goal. Scrum team generally consists of one product owner, one scrum master, and developers (sometimes separate testers and BA). There are no hierarchies in a scrum team.
Q #6) What do you think should be the ideal size of a Scrum team?
Answer: The ideal size of a scrum team is between 3 and 9 people
Q #7) What do you discuss in the daily scrum?
Answer: 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.
Q #8) What is the “Time Boxing” of a scrum process called?
Answer: It’s called “Sprint”
Q #9) What should be an ideal duration of a sprint?
Answer: It is recommended to have 2—4 weeks of the sprint cycle.
Q #10) How requirements are defined in a scrum?
Answer: Product backlog is the single source of all requirements within a scrum.
Q #11) What are the different artifacts in scrum?
Answer: There are three scrum artifacts:
- Product Backlog: The product backlog includes all the items that will be delivered for the product. This list is constantly evolving. The commitment of the product backlog is the product goal.
- Sprint Backlog: Sprint backlog is a list of all items committed to being delivered within a sprint. Once decided, the sprint backlog cannot be changed. The commitment of the sprint backlog is the sprint goal.
- Product Increment: Product increment is usually delivered at the end of the sprint, which is a workable increment of the overall product.
Q #12) How do you define a user story?
Answer: 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.
Q #13) What are the roles of a Scrum Master and Product owner?
Answer:
Scrum Master 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.
Product Owner 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.
Q #14) How do you measure the work done in a sprint?
Answer: 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.
Q #15) What is Velocity?
Answer: Velocity is the sum of story points that a scrum team completes (meets the definition of done) over a sprint.
Q #16) So in the scrum, which entity is responsible for the deliverables? Scrum Master or Product Owner?
Answer: Neither the scrum master, not the product owner. It’s the responsibility of the scrum team who owns the deliverable.
Q #17) How do you measure the complexity or effort in a sprint? Is there a way to determine and represent it?
Answer: Complexity and effort are measured through “Story Points”. In Scrum, it’s recommended to use the Fibonacci series to represent it.
Q #18) How do you track your progress in a sprint?
Answer: The progress is tracked by a “Sprint Burn-Down chart”.
Q #19) How do you create the Burn-Down chart?
Answer: 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.
Q #20) What do you do in a sprint review and retrospective?
Answer: 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.
Q #21) Do you see any disadvantages of using scrum?
Answer: 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.
Q #22) Do you think scrum can be implemented in all the software development processes?
Answer: Yes, the origin of scrum as a method was to facilitate the software development process.
Q #23) During Review, suppose the product owner or stakeholder does not agree to the feature you implemented, what would you do?
Answer: 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.
Q #24) In case, the scrum master is not available, would you still conduct the daily stand-up meeting?
Answer: Yes, we can very well go ahead and do our daily stand-up meeting.
Q #25) Where does automation fit into scrum?
Answer: 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.
Q #26) What is the difference between a product backlog and a sprint backlog?
Answer: Here are the main differences:
- 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.
- Product backlog is maintained by the product owner, but the team maintains the sprint backlog.
- Product backlog is evolving list, but sprint backlog cannot be changed when agreed.
Q #27) Can you give an example of where scrum cannot be implemented? In that case, what do you suggest?
Answer: 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.
Q #28) Tell me the advantages of using scrum?
Answer: There are many advantages of using scrum:
- 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
- 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
- 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 members.
Q #29) What is DoD? How is this achieved?
Answer: 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.
Q #30) What is MVP in scrum?
Answer: 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.
Q #31) What are Epics?
Answer: 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.
Q #32) How do you calculate a story point?
Answer: 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.
Q #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: 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.
Q #34) You are in the middle of a sprint and suddenly the product owner comes with a new requirement, what will you do?
Answer: 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.
Q #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: 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.
Tips for Passing the Scrum Master or Product Owner Exam
SCRUM MASTER
#1) Format
- Multiple Choice, Multiple Answer, True/False
- Fee: $150
- Passing score: 85%
- Time Limit: 60 Minutes
- Buy test from PROFESSIONAL SCRUM MASTER™ I
#2) Important Topics to remember
- Difference between scrum backlog and product backlog
- Scrum Artefacts
- Scrum Events – very important
- Scrum Roles
- Learn the definition of Scrum Master in detail
#3) Practice Tests
- SCRUM OPEN
- PSM I™ Preparation Quiz – Real Mode
- Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I) Practice Assessment
PRODUCT OWNER
#1) Format
- Multiple Choice, Multiple Answer, True/False
- Fee: $200
- Passing score: 85%
- Time Limit: 60 Minutes
- Buy test from PROFESSIONAL SCRUM PRODUCT OWNER™ I
#2) Important Topics to remember
- All of the above + Product Increment
- Read responsibilities of product owner – Trick questions to identify responsibility of product owner vs scrum master
- Read Product backlog details
#3) Practice Tests
- SCRUM OPEN
- PRODUCT OWNER OPEN
- PSM I™ Preparation Quiz – Real Mode
- Professional Scrum Product Owner I (PSPO I) Practice Assessment
Hope some of the most frequently asked scrum interview questions and answers will be helpful for you for preparing the Scrum interview.