Scrum Master Interview Questions

Scrum believes that employees are self-motivated and seek to accept greater responsibility. So, they deliver much greater value when self-organized.

The preferred leadership style in Scrum is "servant leadership", which emphasizes achieving results by focusing on the needs of the Scrum Team.

Some of the benefits of Self-organization are:

• Team buy-in and shared ownership
• Motivation, which leads to an enhanced performance level of the team
• Innovative and creative environment conducive to growth

Monitor communications between them and facilitate direct collaboration.

7 Proven Strategies to Improve your Scrum Team Communication:

1. Improve Transparency
2. Facilitate Interactions
3. Bring Clarity
4. Make Communication Visual
5. Create Trust in the Environment
6. Unite People with Purpose
7. Use Non-Violent Communication

Ask the developers to divide themselves into teams of 3-9 people.

The Scrum Guide covers the development, but not the team building.  The Scaling Scrum approach is actually to bring the 100+ developers in one room and give them the task to build teams of 3-9 people. This supports self organization and puts responsibility where it belongs. You can help them a lot by presenting the Product Backlog and other useful context information.

Key responsibilities of a Scrum Master involves:

• Tracking and monitoring
• Understanding requirements properly
• Work to reach the project goal
• Process checking master and quality master
• Protect the team from detachments
• Improving the performance of the team
• Lead the meetings and resolve issues
• Resolution of conflicts and impediments
• Communication and reporting

The three scrum roles are:

Product Owner: A product owner is actually the stakeholder of the project. He represents the project requirements before the team. He is responsible to have a vision of what to build and convey his detailed vision to the team. He is the starting point of an agile scrum software development project.

Development Team: Scrum team is formed by the collective contribution of individuals who perform for the accomplishment of a particular project. The team is bound to work for the timely delivery of the requested product.

Scrum Master: Scrum master is the leader and the coach for the scrum team who checks whether the scrum team is executing committed tasks properly. He is also responsible to increase the efficiency and productivity of the team so that they can achieve the sprint goal effectively.

Sashimi style of stories are sliced along functionality instead of technology. Each sprint, an increment of the work includes more functionality to complete the story.  This gradual building of the feature through stories reduces risks, surfaces issues in the design, requirements or misunderstandings early on in the process.

Sashimi is a Japanese word which means pierced body. Basically, it is a Japanese dish which consists of fresh meat or fish, sliced into thin pieces. Each piece is similar in taste when compared with the other pieces.

Sashimi in scrum methodology means every phase of software development cycle in a sprint which includes requirement analysis, planning &  design, development, testing, documentation is complete or not and the product is ready to be displayed etc.

A story point in Scrum is the unit for the estimation of total efforts that are required to perform or complete a particular task.

A story point is a metric used in agile project management and development to estimate the difficulty of implementing a given user story, which is an abstract measure of effort required to implement it. In simple terms, a story point is a number that tells the team about the difficulty level of the story. Difficulty could be related to complexities, risks, and efforts involved.

Traditional software teams give estimates in a time format: days, weeks, months. Many agile teams, however, have transitioned to story points. Story points rate the relative effort of work in a Fibonacci-like format: 0, 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100. It may sound counter-intuitive, but that abstraction is actually helpful because it pushes the team to make tougher decisions around the difficulty of work.

The scrum master is the leader as well as coach of the Scrum team. The scrum master is responsible to serve and protect his team from any kind of distractions that could affect their performance. The main role of the scrum master is to motivate his team to achieve the sprint goal. He is focused to build a self-organized and motivated team where each member is familiar with the implementation of Agile and Scrum principles and applications.

The scrum master keeps a proper check on the scrum team if they are executing committed tasks properly. He is also responsible to increase the efficiency and productivity of the team so that they can achieve the sprint goal effectively.

The burn-up chart illustrates the amount of completed work in a project whereas the burn-down chart depicts the amount of work remained to complete a project.

Thus, the burn-up and burn-down charts are used to trace the progress of a project.

Scrum-ban is a Scrum and Kanban-based model for the software development. This model is specifically used for the projects that need continuous maintenance, have various programming errors or have some sudden changes. This model promotes the completion of a project in minimum time for a programming error or user story.