Some time ago, someone on Reddit asked whether there would be any other profession that requires attending a 2-day training class and would then pay as well as a Scrum Master job. This attitude is precisely why the 47 Scrum Master Interview Guide exists: Prevent imposters from slipping through the hiring process and causing damage.
If you are looking to fill a position for a Scrum Master (or agile coach) in your organization, you may find the following 47 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. They are derived from my fourteen years of practical experience with XP as well as Scrum, serving both as Product Owner and Scrum Master as well as interviewing dozens of Scrum Master candidates on behalf of my clients.
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The ebook provides both questions as well as guidance on the range of suitable answers. These should allow an interviewer to deep dive into a candidate’s understanding of Scrum and her agile mindset. However, please note that:
Please find following 47 Scrum Master interview questions to identify suitable candidates for the role of Scrum Master or agile coach.
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Your Scrum team is consistently failing to meet commitments, and its velocity is volatile. What might the possible reasons be? How would you address this issue with the team?
If a Scrum Team is exhibiting a volatile velocity, consistently failing to meet their forecasts, it suggests that velocity is being used as the prevalent metric for measuring that team’s progress.
Your candidate should mention this, and talk about the notoriety of ‘velocity’ as the industry’s most prevalent metric for measuring a team’s progress. They should further be able to explain why velocity is altogether a doubtful agile metric and point out that quantitative metrics are not ideally suited to measuring a team’s progress in mastering Scrum.
There are many factors that make a Scrum Team’s velocity volatile:
Another common cause for a Scrum Team to consistently fail in meeting their forecasts is that the team’s Product Backlog items are being poorly prepared, thus making the work items difficult for the team to estimate. Conversely, the projects being given the team might suffer from poorly documented legacy code, excessive technical debt, or just too much buggy and poorly written code — all of which make estimation a gamble.
Your candidate should not align themselves with the fallacy that a team’s adoption of Scrum is working only because a Scrum Team’s forecasts and velocity are aligned. Cooking the agile books is easy to do!
Read more: Scrum: The Obsession with Commitment Matching Velocity.
What suitable agile metrics have you used in the past?
This question is an invitation to the candidate to share lessons learned from the successful application of metrics to help a Scrum Team improve continuously.
Suitable agile metrics follow three rules:
Examples of suitable agile metrics are:
Good candidates should be aware of the evidence-based management concept.
What qualitative agile metrics would you consider tracking?
The purpose of qualitative metrics is to gain insight into how one or more of an organization’s Scrum Teams are progressing with agile.
There are several self-assessment tests available that a Scrum Team can regularly run to collect qualitative metrics about their implementation of Scrum — Hendrik Kniberg’s Scrum Checklist is a good example. The interval to test via self-assessment is every 4–12 weeks, with teams of lesser fluency running their tests at the lower end of this range. The individual values recorded by these tests are not very important, but the trend over time is. To visualize these trends, a Scrum Master will need to aggregate the results — in the case of Henrik Kniberg’s checklist, an agile practice map may be created over time.
While self-assessment tests like Henrik Kniberg’s checklist are usually team exercises for recording implementation metrics, sentiment metrics are best captured by running anonymous opinion polls to ensure the participation of the more introverted team members.
Using opinion polls, typical questions for recording sentiment metrics include:
It’s best to run opinion polls after every Sprint; these polls should only require a few seconds to complete. As with the self-assessment tests, the individual values recorded by running anonymous opinion polls are not very important — it’s the trend over time that matters. Trends derived from these polls are great points for discussion during a team’s Sprint Retrospectives.
Concerning metrics in general, your candidate should support the Agile Manifesto and its principle of transparency: all metrics should be available to all members of a Scrum Team, and largely also to those working in the product delivery organization generally.
Read more: Agile Metrics — The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
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How would you prepare to kick-off transitioning to Scrum?
If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. Your candidate should understand that an agile transition needs to have an objective and a goal — which means planning ahead.
To prepare for kicking off a transition to Scrum is to listen and observe: your candidate should express interest in interviewing as many team members and stakeholders as possible, before jumping into action. These interviews should include everyone, no matter their role — engineers, QA professionals31, UX and UI designers, product managers — in order to identify the patterns underlying current problems, failures, and dysfunction within the organization. Merging those patterns with the most pressing technical and business issues will identify the most likely objectives for the first Scrum Teams. This observation phase, during which a Scrum Master performs their interviews, will typically require between four and twelve weeks depending upon the size and structure of the organization.
The training of future team members and stakeholders should commence and run parallel to the interviews.
Creating the first Scrum Teams from the existing engineering and product departments is the second step in kicking off a transition to Scrum.
Your candidate should be able to sketch the rough plan of a transition and address common issues that might arise during kickoff.
Read more: How to Kick-off Your Agile Transition.
How would you create the first Scrum team?
When an organization is transitioning to Scrum and at the same time dealing with significant organizational, business, and technical problems, the founding members of its Scrum Teams should be volunteers who fully understand the challenge ahead of them, rather than people pressed into service. The best volunteers are those eager to prove that becoming agile is the most effective way to reach an objective.
Candidates for the role of Scrum Master should be astute enough to suggest inviting every member of the product delivery team, as well as the C-level executives sponsoring the transition, to a kickoff meeting. The objective of a transition kickoff meeting is to support the members of the engineering and product teams in how they choose to self-organize into the first cross-functional Scrum Teams. Transition kickoff meetings can last a few hours or several days, depending upon the circumstances of a particular organization.
Despite the importance of the kickoff meeting to a Scrum transition, going much deeper into its structure will take too much time from the interview. It’s more important that your candidates embrace the idea of team self-selection and present a brief roadmap of what should happen next for the newly formed Scrum Teams.
Although somewhat dependent upon the existing skills, experience, and training of the members of an organization’s new Scrum Teams, your candidates should anticipate having to teach the very basics of Scrum following a kickoff meeting. They might propose doing this through a series of workshops or on-the-job training with exercises in Product Backlog refinement, writing user stories, estimating, creating boards, and setting up collaboration software.
What do you recommend a newly formed Scrum team works on first?
The first critical issue for the majority of newly formed Scrum Teams is the existing legacy Product Backlog. Answers to this question need not reference Tuckman’s team development stages (see Question 28), additional team-building exercises, or any kind of Scrum training or workshop not concerned with the Product Backlog.
It is a rare occasion for a Scrum Master to start from scratch with a brand new team and no existing product — even more so in a nascent organization like a startup. Most often, it’s an existing product delivery organization with existing products and services that will ‘go agile’. For these cases, your candidate should point out that refining the legacy Product Backlog is the practical first step.
The legacy Product Backlog per se is an interesting artifact because it provides a comprehensive insight into the product delivery organization’s history: this particular Product Backlog allows for identifying organizational debt, process insufficiencies, questionable product decisions, and other anti-patterns.
Looking at a legacy Product Backlog, an excellent candidate will be able to point out some of these anti-patterns (e.g. outdated or poorly maintained tickets), and provide a good idea about how to transform the legacy Product Backlog into a well-refined, current Product Backlog such that a new Scrum Team could work with.
Candidates should mention that running Product Backlog refinement workshops creates a good opportunity to provide a new Scrum Team and Product Owner hands-on training with Scrum. This is because a Product Backlog refinement workshop will typically cover user story creation, knowledge transfer among team members, the estimation process (if applicable), introductory agile metrics, technical debt analysis, and other topics critical to the success of Scrum.
Read more: Product Backlog Refinement.
What anti-patterns might a Scrum Master fall into during a Sprint?
Typical Scrum Master Sprint anti-patterns are below. Any of these behaviors will impede the team’s productivity. It is the Scrum Master’s obligation to prevent them from manifesting themselves. Some of the Scrum Master anti-patterns are:
Read more: Scrum Master Anti-Patterns — 20 Signs Your Scrum Master Needs Help.
What anti-patterns do you know of that can happen during a Sprint Retrospective?
Typical Scrum Sprint Retrospective anti-patterns are:
Read more: : 21 Sprint Retrospective Anti-Patterns Impeding Scrum Teams.
How can you (as a Scrum Master) identify where you need to improve?
This is a simple question: Regularly ask your team and stakeholders how you can improve as a Scrum Master.
Why not run a Sprint Retrospective on yourself? A dedicated Sprint Retrospective is much more effective than spending five minutes, asking for hints at how you might improve, at the end of each regular team Sprint Retrospective.
Good candidates also note that they proactively provide user manuals on how to work with themselves to other team members and the organization.
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