Scrum Methodology

Scrum is an agile methodology for project management. Scrum and software development work together to create better results, faster. Looking for a job role in project management then you must checkout these interview questions, these can help you to lend a job.

Q.1 What is Scrum, and what are its key principles?
Scrum is an agile framework for managing and delivering projects. Its key principles include transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
Q.2 What are the three roles in Scrum, and what are their responsibilities?
The three roles are Product Owner (defines product requirements), Scrum Master (facilitates the Scrum process), and Development Team (creates the product).
Q.3 What is a Sprint in Scrum?
A Sprint is a time-boxed iteration, typically 2-4 weeks, during which a potentially shippable increment of the product is developed.
Q.4 What is a Product Backlog in Scrum?
The Product Backlog is a prioritized list of all the features, enhancements, and fixes required for the product, maintained by the Product Owner.
Q.5 What is a Sprint Backlog in Scrum?
The Sprint Backlog is a subset of items from the Product Backlog selected for the current Sprint and is the focus of work for the Development Team.
Q.6 What is a Daily Scrum (Standup) meeting?
The Daily Scrum is a short, daily meeting where the Development Team synchronizes their work, discusses progress, and identifies obstacles.
Q.7 What is the purpose of the Sprint Review meeting?
The Sprint Review is held at the end of a Sprint to demonstrate the completed work to stakeholders and gather feedback for the next Sprint.
Q.8 What is the Sprint Retrospective meeting?
The Sprint Retrospective is a meeting at the end of a Sprint where the Scrum Team reflects on their process and identifies areas for improvement.
Q.9 What is the Definition of Done (DoD) in Scrum?
The Definition of Done is a clear and agreed-upon set of criteria that a product increment must meet to be considered complete.
Q.10 What is the role of the Scrum Master?
The Scrum Master serves the team by facilitating Scrum events, removing impediments, and ensuring the team follows Scrum principles and practices.
Q.11 How does Scrum promote transparency in project management?
Scrum promotes transparency by making all work visible, such as through the Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, and Sprint Burndown Chart.
Q.12 What is the purpose of the Sprint Planning meeting?
Sprint Planning defines the work for the upcoming Sprint, with the Product Owner presenting the Sprint Goal and the team selecting items from the Product Backlog.
Q.13 What is a Sprint Burndown Chart?
A Sprint Burndown Chart is a graphical representation showing the remaining work in a Sprint, helping the team track progress toward the Sprint Goal.
Q.14 How does Scrum handle changing requirements during a Sprint?
Scrum recommends that changes to Sprint scope are minimized, but if necessary, the Product Owner can negotiate with the Development Team to make adjustments.
Q.15 What is the role of the Product Owner?
The Product Owner is responsible for defining and prioritizing the Product Backlog, ensuring the team works on valuable items, and representing stakeholders' needs.
Q.16 How does Scrum address team self-organization?
Scrum encourages Development Teams to self-organize, make decisions, and collaborate to determine how best to achieve Sprint Goals.
Q.17 What is a User Story in Scrum?
A User Story is a simple, user-focused description of a product feature, often written as "As a [user], I want [action] so that [benefit]."
Q.18 What is Velocity in Scrum?
Velocity is a metric that measures the amount of work completed by a Development Team in a Sprint and is used for estimating future Sprints.
Q.19 How does Scrum manage risk in projects?
Scrum manages risk by breaking work into small, manageable increments and allowing for regular inspection and adaptation throughout the project.
Q.20 What is the role of stakeholders in Scrum?
Stakeholders provide input, feedback, and support for the product, with the Product Owner representing their interests.
Q.21 What is the Sprint Goal in Scrum?
The Sprint Goal is a concise statement that defines the purpose and expected outcome of a Sprint, providing focus for the Development Team.
Q.22 What is the role of the Development Team in Scrum?
The Development Team is responsible for turning items from the Product Backlog into a potentially shippable product increment during Sprints.
Q.23 What do you understand about Scrum?
Scrum refers to an Agile framework that can help teams work together. This allows teams to learn from experiences, self-organize while working on problems in order for reflecting on their victories and failures and for making improvements.
Q.24 How does Scrum facilitate continuous improvement?
Scrum promotes continuous improvement through the Sprint Retrospective, where the team reflects on their process and identifies changes to make.
Q.25 What are the various roles in Scrum?
1. Product Owner The product owner refers to an individual who is responsible for expanding the ROI by determining product features. They prioritize these features into a list and focus on the upcoming sprint. 2. Scrum Master This individual helps the team in learning to apply Scrum for ensuring the best business value. The scrum master removes barriers, guards the team against distractions, and allows them to adopt agile practices. 3. Scrum Team They are a group of individuals who work together for making sure that the requirements of the stakeholders are delivered.
Q.26 What is the purpose of the Scrum Guide?
The Scrum Guide provides a definitive source of Scrum principles and practices, serving as a reference for Scrum teams and practitioners.
Q.27 Describe the duties of the Scrum Team.
The Scrum Team checks that the working products must be developed and delivered during each sprint. They are responsible for maintaining ownership and transparency for the work allocated to the team members. Net, they verify that the correct information must be provided for a successful daily scrum meeting. Lastly, they work together within a team for achieving the outcome.
Q.28 How does Scrum help manage project dependencies?
Scrum encourages the early identification of dependencies and collaboration with other teams to manage them effectively.
Q.29 Differentiate between scrum and waterfall.
In scrum, the feedback from the customer is received at an early stage. And, in a waterfall, the feedback from the customer is received towards the end of the development cycle. Secondly, accommodating the new or changed requirement in scrum is easier than the waterfall. Thirdly, scrum focuses on collaborative development. And in a waterfall, the whole development cycle is divided into phases. Next, it is possible to roll back the changes in scrum than in waterfall. Lastly, there is a testing phase in the waterfall but not in the scrum.
Q.30 What are the common anti-patterns in Scrum?
Common anti-patterns include not having a dedicated Scrum Master, overcommitting in Sprint Planning, and neglecting the importance of the Definition of Done.
Q.31 What makes scrum different from the Iterative model?
Scrum can be considered as a type of iterative model but it is both iterative and incremental.
Q.32 What is the role of the Scrum Team during a Sprint?
The Scrum Team collaborates to achieve the Sprint Goal, with the Development Team doing the work, the Product Owner defining what needs to be done, and the Scrum Master facilitating the process.
Q.33 Can you name any agile methodology apart from Scrum?
Some Agile methodology includes: Kanban XP Lean.
Q.34 How does Scrum handle unplanned work or urgent issues during a Sprint?
Unplanned work or urgent issues are addressed through a discussion in the Daily Scrum, and the team decides how to accommodate them while still meeting the Sprint Goal.
Q.35 Describe the ceremonies performed in the scrum.
There are three major ceremonies executed in Scrum: 1. Planning Meeting In this, the full scrum teams along with the scrum master and product owner meet for discussing every item from the product backlog that they can work on in the sprint. 2. Review Meeting In this, the scrum team illustrates their work done to the stakeholders. 3. Retrospective meeting In this, the scrum teams along with the scrum master and product owner meet for retrospecting of the last sprint they worked on. Here, there discuss: What could be done better? What went well? Action Items
Q.36 What is a Sprint Review artifact?
A Sprint Review artifact is the increment of work completed during a Sprint, which is demonstrated to stakeholders during the Sprint Review meeting.
Q.37 Define Backlog grooming meeting.
In this, the scrum team along with the scrum master and product owner meets. Here, the product owner put forward the business needs as per the priority and the team discussed over them. Then, they identify the complexity, dependencies, and efforts accordingly. However, at this stage, the team may also do the story pointing.
Q.38 What are the benefits of using Scrum for project management?
Benefits include increased transparency, faster delivery of value, improved collaboration, adaptability to changing requirements, and enhanced team engagement.
Q.39 Can you tell the absolute size of a Scrum team?
The ideal size of a scrum team is 7 to 9 with +/- 2.
Q.40 How does Scrum handle situations where the Product Owner is unavailable or changes frequently?
Scrum recommends having a stable Product Owner but allows delegation of authority to a proxy when needed.
Q.41 Explain the types of artifacts in scrum?
There are two artifacts maintained in Scrum: Firstly, Product Backlog. This consists of the prioritized list of business requirements Secondly, Sprint Backlog. This consists of the user stories to be done by the scrum team for a sprint.
Q.42 What is the role of the Scrum of Scrums in large-scale projects?
Scrum of Scrums is a coordination meeting for multiple Scrum teams, facilitating communication, alignment, and issue resolution among teams.
Q.43 What is the process for defining a user story?
The user stories are specified in the format of: As a I want to So that < objective>
Q.44 How does Scrum accommodate distributed or remote teams?
Scrum can work with distributed teams by using video conferencing, digital tools, and ensuring overlapping work hours for collaboration.
Q.45 Define Velocity.
Velocity can be considered as the sum of story points that a scrum team completes across a sprint.
Q.46 What is the purpose of a Definition of Ready in Scrum?
The Definition of Ready sets criteria that a backlog item must meet before it can be considered for selection in Sprint Planning.
Q.47 What is the process for creating the Burn-Down chart?
A burn-down chart refers to a graph that displays the estimated and actual effort of the scrum tasks. This can be considered as a tracking mechanism by which for a particular sprint day to day tasks are tracked for verifying check whether the stories are progressing towards the completion of the committed story points or not.
Q.48 What is the role of technical debt in Scrum projects?
Technical debt represents the cost of shortcuts or compromises made during development and should be managed and addressed over time.
Q.49 Explain the process of a sprint review and retrospective.
During Sprint review we walk-through and illustrate the feature or story implemented by the scrum team to the stakeholders. And, during the retrospective, our major aim is to identify what went well, what could be done better, and action items in a collaborative way for having continuous improvement.
Q.50 How does Scrum promote collaboration between development and testing teams?
Scrum promotes cross-functional teams, where developers and testers work together to ensure that user stories meet the Definition of Done.
Q.51 Can you explain the role of automation in scrum?
Automation plays an important role in Scrum. That is to say, for having continuous feedback and ensuring the quality deliverables, it must be good for implementing TDD, BDD, and ATDD automation methods during development. Moreover, Automation in scrum is related to testing as well as all aspects of software development.
Q.52 What is the role of impediment resolution in Scrum?
The Scrum Master is responsible for helping the team identify and remove impediments that hinder progress toward the Sprint Goal.
Q.53 Define the DoD process.
DoD stands for Definition of Done. This can be achieved when: Firstly, the story is development complete Secondly, the QA is complete Thirdly, the story meets and satisfies the acceptance standards Fourthly, regression around the story is complete Lastly, the feature is eligible to be shipped/deployed in production.
Q.54 How does Scrum handle situations where team members are multitasking on multiple projects or tasks?
Scrum encourages focus on a single Sprint Backlog item at a time to optimize productivity and reduce context switching.
Q.55 What do you understand about MVP in scrum?
MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product that provides the basic minimum required feature which can be illustrated to the stakeholders and is eligible to be shipped to production.
Q.56 How does Scrum address the estimation of user stories?
Scrum teams often use relative estimation techniques like Story Points to estimate user stories, which is based on complexity, uncertainty, and effort.
Q.57 Define the term Epics.
Epics can be considered as equivocal user stories that are not specified and are kept for future sprints. This can also be defined as a big chunk of work that can be split into smaller user stories. However, the Epic can be expanded across sprints and agile teams. Further, this can be a high-level description of what the client wants, and accordingly, it has some value linked to it.
Q.58 What is the role of the Scrum Master in conflict resolution within the team?
The Scrum Master facilitates open communication and collaboration, helping the team address conflicts constructively and find resolutions.
Q.59 What will you do if the product owner comes with a new requirement while you have completed working halfway in the sprint?
In an ideal case, the requirement becomes a story and is transferred to the backlog. Then depending on the priority, teams can take it up in the next sprint. However, if the priority of the requirement is high, then the team will have to assist it in the sprint. But, here, it is necessary to communicate with the stakeholder that incorporating a story the halfway of the sprint can result in spilling across a few stories to the next sprint.
Q.60 What is the purpose of a Definition of Done (DoD) in Scrum?
The DoD ensures that each product increment is of high quality and meets the team's agreed-upon criteria for completeness.
Q.61 What if you get the story on the very last day of the sprint for testing and there are defects. What will you do?
A story is done only when its development and QA are completed with meeting the acceptance criteria and finally eligibility for shipping into production. However, if there are defects, the story is partially done and not completely done, the best possible solution here is to spill it over to the next sprint.
Q.62 How does Scrum handle changes in team composition during a project?
Scrum encourages stable teams, but if changes are necessary, it's essential to ensure that new team members are integrated smoothly and provided with proper orientation.
Q.63 Define Agile Testing.
Agile testing can be considered a practice depending on the principles of agile software development. This contains all members of an agile team with defined skills and certain expertise for ensuring the timely delivery of a product with the release of additional features at frequent intervals.
Q.64 What is a Spike in Scrum, and when is it used?
A Spike is a time-boxed research and exploration activity used when the team needs to investigate a technical or design issue before estimating a user story.
Q.65 Compare extreme programming with scrum.
Scrum teams have to work in iterations that are called sprints. These sprints last up to two weeks to one month long. And, in extreme programming (XP) team works in the iteration that lasts for one or two weeks. However, in XP, teams are more flexible as they can modify their iterations. But, in Scrum teams do not allow any modification in their iterations. Further, in the scrum, the product owner prioritizes the product backlog but the team decides the sequence in which they will develop the backlog items. And, in XP, the team works in strict priority order, features developed are prioritized by the customers.
Q.66 How does Scrum promote feedback from end-users or customers?
Scrum encourages regular feedback through Sprint Reviews, where stakeholders, including end-users, provide input on the product increment.
Q.67 Define lean methodology.
The lean software development technique follows the principle of “Just in time production”. This focuses on increasing the speed of software development and reducing costs. However, the idea of lean is to lower non-value-added activities like wastes for increasing customer value. Further, the agile process itself is a lean technique for the software development lifecycle.
Q.68 What is the purpose of a Sprint Burnup Chart?
A Sprint Burnup Chart shows the progress of work during a Sprint, helping the team visualize how they are tracking against their Sprint Goal.
Q.69 What do you know about Kanban?
Kanban can be considered as a tool that helps the team to keep a close eye on the work in order for measuring its progress. Using the Kanban board, the status of a development story can be smoothly explained. Further, the Kanban board assist in writing the complete scenario of a project in a single place for providing a perfect picture of the bottleneck, a task done, workflow progress. This also helps in the continuous delivery of the product without overburdening the team.
Q.70 How does Scrum handle scope changes requested by stakeholders mid-Sprint?
Scope changes during a Sprint should be avoided, but if necessary, the Product Owner and Development Team must discuss and determine their feasibility and impact on the Sprint Goal.
Q.71 Define incremental and iterative development.
The iterative methodology refers to a process of software development with no interruption. In this, software development cycles containing sprint and release are repeated until the final product is obtained. Whereas, the incremental model refers to a process of software development where the product is planned, implemented, and tested incrementally until the product is finished. This requires both development and maintenance.
Q.72 What is the role of the Definition of Ready in Sprint Planning?
The Definition of Ready ensures that backlog items are well-defined, properly estimated, and ready to be selected for the Sprint during Sprint Planning.
Q.73 What do you understand about pair programming?
Pair programming can be defined as the combined effort in the team where one programmer writes the code and the other one reviews. This helps in improving the quality of code and facilitates knowledge transfer. Further, it also lowers the chance of mistakes while working simultaneously on a code.
Q.74 How does Scrum handle technical debt management?
Scrum teams allocate time in Sprints to address technical debt, ensuring that it does not accumulate and impact product quality negatively.
Q.75 Define scrum of scrums.
Scrum of Scrums term is used when there are multiple teams required in a project. This can be considered as the scaling of the daily Scrum meeting. However, here, every team is responsible for conducting and leading its separate scrum meeting. And, for maintaining coordination and communication among all the different teams, a separate meeting must be conducted in which there is the participation of all the teams participate.
Q.76 What is the purpose of the Scrum of Scrums meeting?
The Scrum of Scrums meeting allows multiple Scrum teams to coordinate and share updates, addressing dependencies and aligning efforts in large-scale projects.
Q.77 How will you say if someone is a good agile tester?
An agile tester must have the qualities like: Firstly, they must be capable of understanding the requirements quickly. Secondly, they should be aware of all the agile principles, concepts, and values listed down in an agile manifesto. Thirdly, they should have skills for prioritizing the work depending on the requirements. Lastly, they should have excellent communication skills to interact with business associates, developers, and testers for the agile development process.
Q.78 How does Scrum facilitate risk management in projects?
Scrum encourages early identification and mitigation of risks through continuous inspection and adaptation during Sprints.
Q.79 What are the Agile testing principles?

The principles of Agile testing are:

1. Continuous testing This ensures the continuous progress of the product.

2. Continuous feedback With the execution of every test, client feedback is encouraged for ensuring that the product meets the business requirements of the client.

3. Clean code Errors and defects that arise during the testing phase are fixed inside the same iteration by the Agile team.

4. Minimum documentation Agile teams use a reusable checklist in which they are more focused on the testing process instead of the incidental details.

Q.80 What is the role of a Product Roadmap in Scrum?
A Product Roadmap provides a high-level overview of the product's future direction, helping stakeholders understand the vision and priorities.
Q.81 What do you understand about Agile Metrics?
Some of the essential Agile Metrics include: Firstly, Velocity for keeping track of the project’s velocity so that the Agile team can have a clear view of your progress, capacity, and other metrics. Secondly, Work category allocation for getting a clear idea about where different team members are investing their time and order of priority of the various tasks in a project. Thirdly, Defect removal awareness for correcting the errors simultaneously while developing and testing a product. Then, the Cumulative flow diagram represents the x-axis for time, and the y-axis depicts the effort of members. Next, Sprint burn-down matric for enabling the Agile team to track and monitor the completion of the work along with the sprint. After that, Time coverage for developing and testing each iteration is measured using the ratio between the number of lines in a code and the number of relative lines of codes. Lastly, Defect resolution time –for pertaining the time required for detecting and fixing bugs and issues.
Q.82 How does Scrum handle situations where user stories are not completed within a Sprint?
Incomplete user stories are returned to the Product Backlog, and the team decides whether to address them in a future Sprint or reprioritize them.
Q.83 What do you understand about Zero Sprint in Agile?
Zero Sprint can be considered as the first step that comes before the first sprint. In other words, this is a pre-step to the first sprint. This contains a host of activities that are to be completed before starting a project, including setting up the development environment, preparing backlog, and other such tasks that are commonly done before beginning the actual development process.
Q.84 What is the purpose of a Definition of Ready (DoR) in Scrum?
The DoR sets criteria for backlog items to ensure they are well-understood, clear, and ready for implementation during Sprint Planning.
Q.85 Can you tell the absolute duration of a Scrum Sprint?
The duration of a Scrum Sprint or the Scrum Cycle primarily is based on the project size and the team working on it. That is to say, a Scrum team may consist of 3-9 members and it takes about 3-4 weeks for drafting and completing a Scrum script. So, the average duration of a Scrum Sprint can be four weeks.
Q.86 How does Scrum accommodate changes in market conditions or customer needs?
Scrum's iterative and incremental approach allows teams to adapt quickly to changes by re-prioritizing the Product Backlog and adjusting the Sprint Goal.
Q.87 Define scrum poker technique.
Scrum poker is also known as planning poker which refers to a card-based estimation technique that is based on a general agreement. For starting it, the agile user story is read either by the customer or the owner and the estimator understands its features. After that, every estimator has planning cards with different no. on it like 0,1,2,3,5,8 and so on. These values on the card are absolute days or story points. Then, the estimator chooses cards depending on their estimation by discussing features set by the product owner. However, if a common value is selected, it is an estimate, and if not then, they discuss their maximum and minimum estimation.
Q.88 What is the role of a Sprint Goal in Scrum?
The Sprint Goal provides a clear and focused objective for the team during a Sprint, guiding their work and helping them stay aligned.
Q.89 Can you describe the story point in the scrum?
This can be defined as a unit for estimating the total efforts needed for completing or performing a particular task or implementing a backlog.
Q.90 How does Scrum handle situations where team members have varying skill levels?
Scrum encourages cross-functional teams, where members collaborate to address their varying skill levels and ensure successful Sprint delivery.
Q.91 Define Sashimi.
Sashimi is a Japanese word that means a pierced body. However, in scrum methodology, this states that every phase of the software development cycle in a sprint which covers the requirement analysis, planning & designing, development, testing, documentation is complete or not and the product is ready to be displayed, etc.
Q.92 What is the role of a Definition of Ready (DoR) in Scrum?
The DoR sets criteria for backlog items to ensure they are well-understood, clear, and ready for implementation during Sprint Planning.
Q.93 Define impediments.
Impediments can be defined as any hindrance which stops the smooth flow of work or due to which the team is not able to execute its task in a better way.
Q.94 Can you name some of the agile frameworks?

Yes, some of the agile frameworks are:

  • Scrum
  • Kanban
  • Feature Driven Development
  • Test-Driven Development
Q.95 I want to measure the work done in a sprint. How will I do it?
You can measure the work done in a sprint by Velocity.
Q.96 Define DSDM and ASD.
DSDM stands for Dynamic Software Development Method which focuses on the full project lifecycle for ensuring good governance. This is user-driven and believes that changes to the project are always expected. Moreover, it provides a complete roadmap for delivering products on time and within budget. And, ASD stands for Adaptive System Development which represents the idea that projects should always be in a state of continuous adaptation. This contains the cycle of three repeating series which are: Speculate Collaborate Learn
Q.97 What is refactoring?
Re-factoring refers to an activity that involves alteration or change of the internal structure of software without affecting its external behaviors or functionality. Here, developers make some changes with code for enhancing and improving the internal structure of software. Further, the refactoring process makes the code more readable, understandable, and clean.
Q.98 Name the three Amigos in Scrum?

The three Amigos in scrum are namely –

  • Product Owner,
  • Scrum Master
  • Scrum Team.
Q.99 Describe the ceremonies you perform in scrum?

The three major ceremonies performed in Scrum are -
1. Planning Meeting – In the first step, the entire scrum teams along with the scrum master and product owner meets and 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.
2. Review Meeting – In the second step, the scrum team demonstrates their work done to the stake holders
Retrospective meeting – In the third step, the scrum teams along with the scrum master and product owner meets and retrospect the last sprint they worked on. Such that they discuss about 3 things -

  • What went well?
  • What could be done better?
  • Action Items
Q.100 Describe the various artifacts in scrum?
Primarily there are two artifacts that are maintained in Scrum -
1. Product Backlog – It contains the prioritized list of business requirements.
2. Sprint Backlog – It contains the user stories to be done by the scrum team for a sprint.
Q.101 Define the roles of a Scrum Master and Product owner?

Some of the primarily roles and responsibilities of a Scrum Master and Product Owner are -

  • Scrum Master – 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 – Product Owner is the Point of contact for a scrum team. The product owner is the one who work closest to the business. The primary responsibility of a product owner is to identify and refine the product backlog items.
Q.102 How will you measure the complexity/effort in a sprint?
We can measure complexity and effort through “Story Points”. I would recommend to use Fibonacci series to represent complexity and effort in Scrum.
Q.103 What do you understand by sprint review and retrospective?
During Sprint review we walkthrough and demonstrate the feature or story implemented by the scrum team to the stake holders.
On the other hand, 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.104 Can scrum be implemented in all the software development process?
Primarily scrum be implemented for -
1. Complex kind of project
2. Projects which have early and strict deadlines.
3. When we are developing any software from scratch.
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