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10 Questions For Your Scrum Master Interview

by David Bland

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My Slide Deck presentation for the popular 10 Questions for your Scrum Master Interview Tips as published on InfoQ.

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10 Questions For Your Scrum Master Interview Presentation Transcript

10 Questions for your Scrum Master Interview David J Bland [email_address]

Agile / Scrum Job Data

Interview

your

Interviewer

Just how Agile is this position?

Question #1

Can you describe

your iterations?

(Agile) – 2 weeks max (Agile?) – Over 1 month (Red Flag!) – What’s an iteration?

Question #2

What is the team

size & make up?

(Agile) – Small & cross functional (Red Flag!) – 20+ members in vertical silos (Agile?) – Large but collaborative

Question #3

Are Product Owners

available for Q&A?

(Agile) – Yes & often (Agile?) – Yes about once a week (Red Flag!) – They weigh in after launch

Question #4

Can you explain your

code deployments?

(Agile) – Automated continuous integration (Agile?) – Frequent manual deployments (Red Flag!) – Very large, infrequent batches

Question #5

Do you practice Test

Driven Development?

(Agile) – Yes & Behavior Driven Development (Agile?) – Yes on the important bits (Red Flag!) – We have QA for testing

Question #6

Can you describe

your requirements

documentation?

(Agile) – User Stories with INVEST model (Agile?) – Small paragraphs of requirements (Red Flag!) – Large SRS documents

Question #7

How do you use

project metrics?

(Agile) – Story Points for Release Planning (Agile?) – We estimate most of our tasks (Red Flag!) – Only use MS Project with Gantt

Question #8

How often do your

teams meet?

(Agile) – Daily Stand Ups (Agile?) – A couple times a week (Red Flag!) – Only monthly status meetings

Question #9

Do you have executive

buy-in for Agile?

(Agile) – Yes and we’ve trained our teams (Agile?) – They suggested we try it out (Red Flag!) – My boss thinks it is a fad

Question #10

Can you explain other

responsibilities for the

Scrum Master?

(Agile) – Mentor, Tester, Coder, Designer (Agile?) – Also Project Manager (Red Flag!) – Also the Product Owner

Good luck future Scrum Masters! David J Bland [email_address]

Hamid Seleman, Cooliecutive Director at self employed These questions and answers give you the chance to evaluate the level of scrum methodology adoption and understanding of your future employer (or the interviewer). You may see as opportunities if they responded poorly as you can potentially be the champion and making your presence felt. nice! 8 months ago

Are you sure you want to

David Bland, Agile Consultant at BigVisible No offense taken.

This is a litmus test to determine where they are with Agile, and for a newbie Scrum Master you may not want to jump into an Agile transformation head first.

If you are up for some heavy transformation work as a consultant, the red flags may actually entice you :) 3 years ago

MichaelMahlberg Hi David,

No offense intended, but:

Your 'green' answers desrcibe how I would like my client to be when I leave - so why should I start there in the first place if he's already there?
Or is the idea to use the questions only for possible employments (in contrast to contracted consulting) to rule out the challenging ones?

Or did I get something wrong?

Michael Mahlberg 3 years ago

Khalid Chowdhury, Technical Design Lead at British Airways Like it, short, sweet and full useful information, thank you 3 years ago

David Bland, Agile Consultant at BigVisible It is up to the job seeker to ask hard questions.

Is your potential employer a Waterfall shop pretending to be Agile? If so, then these are quite effective in peeling away the facade.

Obviously if they are XP or Kanban then questions like 'Can you describe your Iterations' may not apply. 3 years ago

machielg This is mostly a Scrum conformance test, you will find people who dedicated their lives to Scrum, but innovators and real problem solvers might not make it through. 3 years ago

David Bland, Agile Consultant at BigVisible While this presentation leans a bit towards Scrum, it can be used for virtually anyone attempting to determine the Agility of a potential employer. 3 years ago