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 ceremonies you perform in the scrum
Q #5. Do you know the Three Amigos in 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 stand up meeting?
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 Scrum which entity is responsible for the deliverable? 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 disadvantage of using scrum?
Q #22. Do you think scrum can be implemented in all 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?
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. Apart from planning, review, and retrospective, do you know any other ceremony
in scrum?
Q #27. Can you give an example of where scrum cannot be implemented? In that case,
what do you suggest?
Q #28. Tell me one big advantage 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 at the last day of the sprint to test and you find there
are defects, what will you do? Will you mark the story to be done?

Now here the answers to the questions:

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.