Scrum Master Interview Questions and Answers

Scrum Master Interview Questions and Answers contains the most frequently asked questions that you might face in an interview & this will help you competently crack the interview. Scrum is a framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value. Scrum Master Interview Questions and Answers will help you in accessing your knowledge & skills as a Scrum Master. Please read Agile Interview Questions and Answer for questions related to Agile Fundamentals.

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Question: What are the few distinguishing factors between a Scrum Master and an Agile Coach?

Answer: Here the interviewer trying to access the knowledge level and if the scrum master knows his/her focus areas.

Parameters	Scrum Master	Agile Coach
Focus Areas	– Works typically with two or three teams. – Focuses on assisting the team with the daily workflow, Scrum practices, often complemented with other frameworks like Kanban, to help teams better.	– Works at the product level involving multiple teams. – Focuses on creating an overarching system for the teams and the leadership to follow.
Knowledge	A scrum master needs to master the Scrum framework thoroughly.	An Agile Coach knows various Agile methods, including Scrum, Kanban, Scaling Methods, and many others.
Duration	Scrum masterworks with the Scrum Team in each sprint and stays with it throughout the life of the Scrum Team.	Limited in comparison to the duration of a scrum master. An agile coach stays with the organization until the goal is accomplished and then moves on.

Question: What is the difference between coaching and mentoring?

Answer: A mentor is someone who shares their knowledge, skills, and/or experience, to help another to develop and grow. A coach is someone who provides guidance to a client on their goals and helps them reach their full potential.

Key differences in mentoring are:

Mentoring is often longer-term with some mentoring relationships lasting 6+ months and in several cases mentoring can last years or even decades. In fact, some famous mentors and mentees cite lifelong mentoring relationships.
No qualifications are required for mentoring, which means that it is easy for organizations to start mentoring developers quickly. Yes, mentoring training is often recommended but it certainly isn’t required and in fact, there are very few mentoring qualifications offered, compared with that coaching qualifications.
As mentioned, mentoring is a lot more directive. It is about the mentor sharing their knowledge, experience, and skills, telling the mentee, and guiding them through the direction.
Typically, mentoring is less structured than coaching, and whilst having a mentoring meeting agenda and goals is recommended, it will be up to the mentee to put this together, compared with coaching which typically follows a more rigorous structure.
Finally, mentoring is mainly development driven and looks to the mentee to decide what they wish to achieve and which goals they have for their mentoring relationships.

Key differences for coaching are:

Coaching is often shorter-term and may be as short as a quick 10- or 15-minute conversation. That said, some coaching relationships can be longer-term too.
There is training in coaching skills and a lot of coaching qualifications are available, and almost always necessary and certainly recommended, to be a truly effective coach.
Unlike mentoring, coaching is non-directive which means that it is about posing the right questions and providing the space, trust, and confidence for the individual being coached to consider how they can achieve more, reach their objectives, and find capabilities within themselves.
Typically, coaching is structured by line managers or sponsors, so organizations will often sponsor an individual to be coached or a line manager will send an employee to be coached for certain skills.
Coaching is performance-driven and encourages the individual or individuals being coached to perform in their day-to-day roles.

Question: How would you establish a highly motivated Scrum team or Trust within the team?

Answer: Here interviewer accessing your approach for team-building activities. So you may start with: I think Team Building Activities (Team Lunch, Adventure activities, etc) greatly impact teams in a positive way as they help to boost team trust & motivation. Trust isn’t something established quickly, it can be quickly lost but not so easily gained. So work continuously with them.

Another way to motivate any team is to empower that team to have control over their own work where they own it and are self-managing. Stay positive during setbacks, no blame game.

The work has to be challenging and create an environment in the team in which they can master a particular skill set but make sure each team member has a balanced workload. Also, aligning the team with a higher purpose will motivate, so having the team aligned with other teams but remaining strongly decoupled with little hand-offs. Being part of a larger vision, and engineering strategy will also motivate.

Give the team opportunities to grow – through knowledge-sharing sessions, and lab-like work where they experiment with different ways of doing things including different technologies. All these are ways to establish a highly motivated Scrum team but it is important to have FUN in the team.

Question: What is your approach to influencing people outside of a team?

Answer: – So, by this, I assume you mean middle and senior leaders/managers within the organization. My approach will be

Depends on their role and what they expect.
Depends on how I can help that particular role within the organization.
By facilitating workshops, training, and events to spread Scrum benefits.

Question: How do you resolve conflict within a team?

Answer: – By adopting a neutral stance

Determine whether this is a long-term or short-term conflict or dispute.
Address the issue openly and honestly and establish understanding between the parties in dispute.
Make sure each party has been heard and acknowledged.
Move the conversation towards a positive outcome or a win-win for both parties by identifying the opportunities that are present in the midst of the conflict.

This is a subjective question so give an example of a conflict between a senior developer and another junior developer and how you resolve it by taking a neutral stance, discussing it one on one with both parties, and extracting a solution out of them instead of you providing the solution.

Question: What is Velocity? How can you know the velocity of a newly set up team and how to plan work for that team’s coming iterations?

Answer: Velocity is a measure of the amount of work a Team can plan during a single Sprint and is the key metric in Scrum. Velocity is calculated at the end of the Sprint by totaling the Points for all completed User Stories.

Velocity = Completed Story points at the end of the sprint.

Average velocity = Total number of story points completed in Sprints (Usually last 3 sprints)/ Number of sprints considered for average velocity calculation

Teams commit to an amount of work for a sprint/iteration based on their average velocity. But a new team doesn’t have a set average velocity so for the first sprint they go by the gut feel of the team. Even based on the team members’ past experience they can tell how much work they can accomplish in a sprint and after pulling that much work in the first sprint they will have to see if that much work was more for them or lesser and based on that experience they choose the amount of work for next sprint and so on. Even you may consider any other comparable team’s initial velocity and plan it.

Question: Can the same Scrum Master be someone external to the organization, such as a consultant/contractor?

Answer: Yes, they can. It is often beneficial to hire an experienced Scrum Master from outside, especially if the organization is just starting its Agile journey and need someone to guide and direct them. However, in the long term, it is prudent for the organization to cultivate native Scrum Masters that they can apply to different teams and projects.

Question: What is INVEST principle?

Answer: We expect our Business Analysts and Product Owners to write user stories using these criteria, which is an acronym –

I – Independent – The user story should be self-contained, in a way that there is no inherent dependency on another user story.
N- Negotiable – User stories, until they become part of an iteration, can always be changed and rewritten.
V – Valuable – A user story must deliver value to the end user.
E – Estimable – You must always be able to estimate the size of a user story.
S – Small – User stories should not be so big as to become impossible to plan, task, and prioritize with a certain level of certainty.
T- Testable – The user story or its related description must provide the necessary information to make test development possible.

Question: Why aren’t user stories simply estimated in man-hours?

Answer: Estimating in hours might also be tricky when:

Legacy software is involved.
The team is facing significant technical debt.
The team is composed of mostly junior members.

Story points are more suitable in these situations because the points more accurately reflect both required effort and complexity. This is a result of points being used not only for estimation but also as a means to measure and convey commitments and team velocity.

Question: How do you integrate into an existing team as a Scrum Master when you first start a new engagement?

Answer: Set expectations about my approach: with managers, leadership, and also the team (they are different discussions). “Expect that I will ask a lot of questions.”
Observe (from an outsider’s POV) what they are already doing, for at most one sprint.

Search & find pain points, look for adherence. Then use the insights to draw up some suggestions, and discuss this with the team and leadership to choose what it takes to mitigate these.

Question: Your team is constantly failing to meet commitments, and its performance velocity is volatile. What might the possible reasons be? How would you address this issue?

Answer: There are many factors that can impact a team’s performance. If the team is new and in their initial sprints then it is expected but it is happening more often then it is an issue.

New team members are being onboarded.
Senior Team members are leaving.
Levels of seniority within developers.
Working in uncharted territory & new technology with less expertise.
Working with legacy code, probably undocumented.
Unexpected technical debt.
Holidays and sick leave.
Too much executive or senior management intervention.

Depending on the scenario the solution will be formulated to address it.

Question: How can you as a Scrum Master contribute to sprint planning in such a way that the team is working only on the most valuable user stories?

Answer: Sprint planning is determining the most efficient path to value creation. The best way to accomplish this is to ensure that:

The scrum team should be involved in the product discovery process at an early stage.
The product backlog refinement process is well understood by both the developers and the product owner. (This can be supported, for example, by the creation of a “Definition of Ready” standard for user stories.)
All user stories are created in a collaborative effort between the product owner and the scrum team. (A shared understanding and joint ownership is the goal).
All user stories selected for the sprint should satisfy INVEST & the product owner should prioritize those using the MoSCoW technique.

Questions: A member of the scrum team does not want to participate in the sprint planning and considers the meetings a waste of time. How do you deal with this attitude?

Answer: This kind of passive-aggressive behavior is not necessarily a problem particular to scrum. It is, however, toxic, and will affect both team-building and performance.

If a member of a scrum team is behaving in this way, the Scrum Master will need to take action, as such behavior can neither be ignored nor tolerated if the team is to continue functioning. Dealing with it may require an escalating approach:

As a first step, the Scrum Master might address the team member privately to discuss their reservations. Perhaps they just need more coaching or a longer training period to change their attitude.
As a second step, the entire team could make it an issue during one or more retrospectives — and offer support to the team member.
If there is still no change of attitude, a meeting with the team member and his or her manager is advisable.
Finally, if no change can be achieved, the team member should be reassigned — potentially to another, probably non-agile team. Alternatively, a Kanban team that would not force the team member out of their comfort zone could be tried. Scrum is not meant for everybody.

Question: Describe a time when your Delivery team members didn’t seem to be getting along. How did you handle this?

Answer: A little bit of conflict is always good, but your interviewer is looking for your ability to be an effective leader. Reflect on a time where you had a few team members that just never seemed to be able to work things out. How did you encourage those team members to work together? Was it a team-building exercise? Did you make sure they had a common goal? State the problem you had, how you addressed it, and the outcome.

As with any interview prep, you’ll want to customize your answers to cater to the company for which you’re interviewing.

Question: What is your approach to influencing people within a team?

Answer: – Modeling Agile myself i.e. leading by example

Observation, Gather insights and then act upon those insights.
Spending time with the strategically important people first i.e. PO as they have the most influence among the team.
At the beginning and end of the team’s iteration of work mostly with the team in providing feedback and teaching/training sessions.
In the middle of the work iteration, spend time individually with the people.
I think to have the right influence on the team, you can’t just spend time with the PO but with everyone.

Question: What do you understand about the Scrum Master role?

Answer: My understanding of the role:-

Be part of a coaching team who are responsible for the Agile Transformation of the organization at all levels – Senior Leaders, Middle Management, and the Operational teams.
The role will probably focus on coaching, mentoring, supporting, teaching, and inspiring Scrum Teams mostly likely working in Scrum.
The focus of those teams will be high performance delivering value to the Commercial Teams.
In addition to that, influencing the rest of the organization through adopting the Agile Principles and Values.

Question: How do you deal with less mature agile teams?

Answer: Let’s define maturity: the ability to self-organize, build trust, share scrum values, and three pillars. Create safety, openness & courage, especially during retrospective meetings. When teams feel safe in a space to discuss things they discuss better and make better decisions. Observe & tweak if needed.

Question: If your manager comes and says they’re not comfortable sizing in story points. They request that we do estimates in hours since it gives them more confidence. If we insist on estimating in points, could we do both hours and points?

Answer: I’d ask why they want it and educate the manager on Agile/Scrum values and the importance of relative sizing in Agile. Focus on getting the team to deliver value consistently. Emphasize tracking value delivered vs tracking how much time it took.

Question: How do you handle a situation where the Product Owner isn’t attending the Scrum Events? Due to this PO is constantly changing requirements in the middle of the sprint?

Answer: Educate the Product Owner why attending the Scrum Events is very important.

Conduct a training session with the Product Owner and coach him on how constantly changing the requirements in the middle of the sprint is going against the SCRUM framework, and how it affects the development team. Also, coach him when he can change the requirement without impacting the development team’s work.

Question: Why is vertical slicing important in Agile?

Answer: ‘vertical slice’ is important because it is delivering working end-to-end features that add value to the customer’s product. It allows for multiple disciplines to deliver increments in each sprint that meet the definition of done.

Question: Why Continuous Integration is important for Agile?

Answer: Continuous Integration is important for Agile for the following reasons

It helps to maintain the release schedule on time by detecting bugs or integration errors
Due to frequent agile code delivery usually every sprint of 2-3 weeks, stable quality of build is a must and continuous integration ensures that
It helps to maintain the quality and bug-free state of code-base
Continuous integration helps to check the impact of work on branches to the main trunk if development work is going on branches using the automatic building and merging function

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