Scrum Interview Questions And Answers

Q #1) How is scrum different from waterfall?

Answer: The major differences are:
 The feedback from the customer is received at an early stage in Scrum than waterfall,
whereas the feedback from the customer is received towards the end of the
development cycle.
 Accommodate the new or changed requirement in scrum is easier than the waterfall.
 Scrum focuses on collaborative development than waterfall where the entire
development cycle is divided into phases.
 At any point of time, we can roll back the changes in scrum than in waterfall.
 Testing is considered a phase in the waterfall, unlike scrum.
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.
Q #4) What are the ceremonies you perform in the scrum?
Answer: There are 3 major ceremonies performed in Scrum:
 Planning Meeting: Here, the entire scrum teams along with the scrum master and
product owner meet to discuss each item from the product backlog that they can work
on the sprint. When the story is estimated and is well understood by the team, the story
then moves into the Sprint Backlog.
 Review Meeting: Here, the scrum team demonstrates their work done to the
stakeholders.
 Retrospective meeting: Here, the scrum teams along with the scrum master and
product owner meet to retrospect the last sprint they worked on. They majorly discuss
on the 3 things:
 What went well?
 What could be done better?
 Action Items
Apart from these three ceremonies, we have one more called “Backlog grooming” meeting.

In this meeting, the scrum team along with the scrum master and product owner. The product
owner put forward the business requirements as per the priority and the team discussed over
it, identifies the complexity, dependencies, and efforts. The team may also do the story pointing
at this stage.

Q #5) Do you know the Three Amigos in Scrum?

Answer: The three Amigos are – Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Scrum Team.
Q #6) What do you think should be the ideal size of a Scrum team?
Answer: The ideal size is 7 to 9 with +/- 2
Q #7) What do you discuss in the daily stand up meeting?
Answer: We discuss the following three things:
 What did I do today?
 What I plan to do tomorrow?
 Any impediments/roadblock
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: Requirements are termed as “User Stories” in Scrum.
Q #11) What are the different artifacts in scrum?
Answer: There are two artifacts maintained in Scrum:
 Product Backlog: Containing the prioritized list of business requirements
 Sprint Backlog: Contains the user stories to be done by the scrum team for a sprint.
Q #12) How do you define a user story?
Answer: The user stories are defined in the format of
As a <User / type of user>

I want to <action/feature to implement>

So that < objective>

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 principals.
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.
Q #14) How do you measure the work done in a sprint?
Answer: It’s measured by Velocity.
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 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 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 Fibonacci series to represent it.
Q #18) How do you track your progress in a sprint?
Answer: The progress is tracked by a “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 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 in a collaborative way what went well, what could be
done better and action items to have continuous improvement.

Q #21) Do you see any disadvantage of using scrum?

Answer: I don’t see any disadvantage of using scrum. The problems mainly arise when the
scrum team do 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 process?
Answer: Scrum is used mainly for
 Complex projects.
 Projects which have early and strict deadlines.
 When we are developing any software from scratch.
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 the 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.
As I said before 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) Apart from planning, review, and retrospective, do you know any other ceremony in
scrum?
Answer: We have the Product Backlog Refinement meeting (backlog grooming meeting) where
the team, scrum master and product owner meets to understand the business requirements,
splits it into user stories, and estimating it.
Q #27) Can you give an example of where scrum cannot be implemented? In that case, what
do you suggest?
Answer: Scrum can be implemented in all kinds of projects. It is not only applicable to software
but is also implemented successfully in mechanical and engineering projects.
Q #28) Tell me one big advantage of using scrum?
Answer: The major advantage is – Early feedback and producing the Minimal Viable Product to
the stakeholders.
Q #29) What is DoD? How is this achieved?
Answer: DoD stands for Definition of Done. 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 equivocal user stories or we can say these are the user stories that are not
defined and are kept for future sprints.
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: In an ideal case, the requirement becomes a story and moves to the backlog. Then
based on the priority, teams can take it up in the next sprint.
But if the priority of the requirement is really high, then the team will have to accommodate it
in the sprint but it has to very well communicated to the stakeholder that incorporating a story
in the middle of the sprint may result in spilling over few stories 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: A story is done only when it is development complete + QA complete + acceptance
criteria is met + it is eligible to be shipped 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.