How To Deal With Score Creep
Score creep refers to a change thats uncontrolled and added without checking its impact on scope, time, cost, etc.
To handle it, heres what needs to be done:
- Close monitoring of work being done on a day-to-day basis.
- Understanding and communicating the vision to the team and ensuring theyre aligned.
- Capturing, reviewing the project requirements regularly , to emphasize to the team & customer about the requirements signed off.
- Ensuring that any changes introduced go through change control & are implemented based on the approval for change request.
- Avoid gold plating.
What Is A User Story
- A user story is an agile software development/ project management tool that provides teams with simple, natural language explanations of one or more features of the project thats written from the perspective of the end-user.
- The user story doesnt go into detail but only mentions how certain types of work will bring value to the end-user. The end-user, in this case, could be an external component or an internal customer/colleague within the organization.
- They also form the building block of agile frameworks like epics and other initiatives.
- They ensure that the teams work towards the goals of the organization, with the help of epics and initiatives.
- The requirements to make a user story a reality are added later, after discussions with the team.
- They are recorded on post-it notes, index cards, or project management software.
What Is Your Favorite Scrum Event
This question can both test your knowledge of Scrum events and reveal your work style as a Scrum master.
There are four scrum events: sprint planning, daily Scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective. They are sometimes called ceremonies. Tie your answer back to what you think is important in the Scrum process. For example, maybe you look forward to the daily Scrum meeting because it allows the team to communicate openly about progress or pain points and build camaraderie.
Other forms this question might take:
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What gets you excited about Scrum?
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What do you think is the most important part of Scrum?
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What Is A Product Roadmap
A product roadmap, as the name suggests, is a powerful tool that describes how a product is likely to grow over time. It is a holistic view of product features that create the product vision. It also indicates what development is building, business goals that the new product will achieve, problems that the product will solve, etc. A product roadmap is owned by the product manager. It also encourages the development team to work together to achieve the desired goal for the successful delivery of the product.
Sample Agile Scrum Methodology Interview Questions
These are some additional Agile Scrum Methodology interview questions for you to practice. Finding solutions to these interview questions will improve your problem-solving skills.
Practicing these popular Agile Scrum interview questions will help you improve your fundamentals and ace your coding interview. You can also practice mock interviews on Agile and Scrum to better prepare.
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Explain Empirical Process Control In Scrum
Empiricism is a very important term when discussing Scrum. It is defined as work thats based on facts, experiences, evidence, observations, and experimentation.
Empiricism is used in Scrum to improve transparency by providing information about what has happened/happening within the team, as well as keeping track of progress and making any changes when require for observation purposes.
Instead of relying on gut feeling or guesswork alone, empirical thinking improves with agile practices such as refactoring code in iterations for example.
What Should Be The Ideal Length Of A Sprint
The Sprint duration should be short enough in order to keep the team focused and also, to keep the business risk acceptable to the Product Owner. Ideally, the sprint length can be short enough to be able to synchronize the development work with other business events. The Scrum guide limits the Sprint length to 1 month but there is no official lower limit. So, 1 week can be often accepted as the shortest sprint duration. So, you can find the length that is best for your team in between 1 week – 1 month.
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What Is The Relationship Between User Stories Tasks And Epics
Why the Interviewer Asks This Question
This is a general knowledge question. Interviewers want to know if you can clearly articulate the relationships between user stories, tasks, and epics, as this is often knowledge a Scrum Master is called upon to teach. Scrum Masters are also responsible for ensuring Scrum principles are upheld when these concepts are applied to the product backlog or Scrum process management tools.
Written by Karrie Day on March 15th, 2022
What to Avoid
Avoid using examples that are not simple or relatable. Some epics are unique to certain lines of business and may confuse the interviewer. For example, do not provide an example epic that is an acronym for a warehousing inventory control function to an interviewer who specializes in HR technology solutions.
Written by Karrie Day on March 15th, 2022
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What Is Pair Programming And What State Its Benefits
Ans: Pair programming is a technique in which two programmers work as a team where. One programmer writes code and the other one reviews that code. They both can switch their roles.
Benefits
- Knowledge transfer is smooth: One experience partner can teach another partner about the codes and techniques.
- Code quality: As the second partner simultaneously reviews the code, the chances of mistakes being occurred will reduce.
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What Are The Sprint Burndown And Burnup Charts
These charts help to keep track of the progress of the sprint. Burn up charts indicates the amount of work completed in the sprint and the burndown chart indicates the amount of work remaining in the sprint
The Product Owner determines the amount of remaining work and compares it to the remaining work of the previous Sprints and forecasts the completion date of the project.
In the Burn-Down chart, the vertical axis shows the amount of work , and the horizontal axis shows the amount of time passed from the beginning of the project or the number of Sprints passed.
We usually add another line to present the uniform distribution of the volume of the work across the initially estimated number of sprints. This line acts as our planned progress and will be used to compare to our actual values.
In the above chart, we can expect the project to be completed earlier than initially planned.
In the Burn-Up chart, the vertical axis is the amount of work and is measured in units or story points, and the horizontal axis is time, usually measured in days.
Each day you can see the amount of work completed and the total amount of work. The distance between the two lines is thus the amount of work remaining. When the two lines meet, the project will be complete. This is a powerful measure of how close you are to completion of the project.
Bill Wake has given us the mnemonic INVEST which help us in writing a well-formed User Story.
Splitting a story is not an easy task.
What Is The Time Boxing Of A Scrum Process Called
Time boxing concept is aligned to make best use of time and remove unwanted distractions by making the team more focused. It is like packing a suitcase where you have fixed amount of space and you try to fit in as much as possible or required for your travel.
So in time boxing, the tasks are broken up in fixed sizes and team works on them. Since the time is fixed, so there is increased focus of the team to make the best use of time.
To get the best value from time boxing, try to have a reasonable time box window that is neither too harsh nor too lenient.
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What Does Build Breaker Mean
Ans: There are certain times when the developer accidentally commits a bug in the software. This bug might stop the process of compilation or generate warring. It is the cause of failure during the normal execution of testing. In such cases, it is said that the build is broken. The main priority of the tester now is to rectify the bug.
Define Epic User Stories And Tasks
Ans: A software feature defined by a customer and itemized in the product backlog is known as epic. The subdivisions of Epics are known as stories.
- User Stories: User stories are prepared according to the client’s perspective such as project or business functions, and delivered in a particular sprint.
- Task: Th user stories are further broken down into various task
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What Are Some Of The Significant Principals Of Agile Testing
How to Answer
This is another example of a follow-up question. You already told the interviewer what agile testing involves. Now they’re digging into more details of the process. As previously discussed, you should always be prepared for follow-up questions during an interview. This is why it’s best to keep your answers short and allow the interviewer to ask follow-up questions if they are interested or need more information.
Written by William Swansen on September 6th, 2021
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Technical
Q3 How Do You Determine If Your Product Is Successful
If the interviewer asks this question from you, they ask about key performance indicators. They want to know how you manage your KPIs and which KPI is important in your perspective for tracking the success of a product or service. You must state that a product is successful if it solves the customers’ problems.
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The Development Team Finds Out During The Sprint That They Aren’t Likely To Build Everything They Forecasted What Would You Expect The Product Owner To Do
Re-work the selected Product Backlog items with the Development Team to meet the Sprint Goal. During the Sprint scope may be clarified and re-negotiated between the Product Owner and Development Team as more is learned. The development team looks to the product owner for product backlog, for alignment and direction on the delivery of value through the sprint goal achievement through the backlog implementation. The backlog can be changed to achieve the Sprint goal, but PO is responsible for value delivered through the implementation of backlog to achieve a sprint goal.
What Is The Difference Between Scrum And Safe
Why the Interviewer Asks This Question
Many enterprises have adopted scaled agile framework models to collectively manage their Scrum teams and projects. Interviewers who ask this question are interested in determining if a candidate understands the gaps the SAFe framework addresses in an enterprise agile development setting.
Written by Karrie Day on March 15th, 2022
What to Avoid
Avoid vague answers that do not describe the specific gaps the SAFe framework was meant to address. Enterprises rely heavily on concepts such as program management that are not addressed in Scrum. Interviewers want to ensure you understand how to manage a Scrum Team and deliver the necessary information to stakeholders outside of the Scrum Team.
Written by Karrie Day on March 15th, 2022
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How Is A Scrum Master A Servant Leader
Servant leadership is a type of leadership that focuses on maintaining trust and confidence. Whats great about this type of leadership is that it can apply to many situations, no matter what the industry or group may be.
The scrum master needs to be a facilitator, a guide, and mentor/friend to all team members. As an example: facilitating meetings where they take notes on everyones ideas, guiding team members through their error reports, mentoring them via one-to-one communication, anything that helps make each individual involved more empowered for the role in which they play.
What Is Agile Testing
One of the unique features of Agile is how software testing is implemented. Developing software is at the core of Agile, and that aligns with the needs of many enterprise organizations, as such testing plays an essential role. Use this question to show your knowledge of Agile testing by providing a complete answer that distinguishes Agile testing from other software testing methods.
Example:Agile testing is the practice of software testing that involves a testing team receiving pieces of code to test. Testing is done parallel to development, especially when customer requirements are frequently changing. Some major principles of Agile testing are error-free clean code, customer satisfaction, sustainable development, collective work between developers and business people, continuous feedback, successive improvement and face-to-face communication.
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What Are Some Of The Techniques You Use To Address Disagreement During User Story Estimation
Why the Interviewer Asks This Question
Estimation activities in Scrum can be intense. Participants are often asked to guess at the level of effort for user stories that have very limited details. Interviewers ask this question to assess how a candidate intends to address situations in which team debate turns into team conflict.
Written by Karrie Day on March 15th, 2022
What to Avoid
Avoid indicating that it is your role as a Scrum Master to sway a team’s decision one way or another. Scrum teams are self-organizing and share leadership responsibilities.
Written by Karrie Day on March 15th, 2022
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Explain The Product Backlog In Scrum
Before the Scrum sprint initiates, the product owner reviews the list of all new features, change requests, enhancements, and bug reports and determines the priority. If the project is new, it includes new features that the new system must provide. This list of items is referred to as a product backlog. The items that are kept on the sprint are referred to as sprint backlog.
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Why Do User Stories Not Estimated In Working Hours
Ans: It is not mandatory to estimate user stories in terms of man hurt as it will mean a lack of product quality, which is to be delivered to the customer. In the case of the working hour, more attention is given to the budget and cost of management.
This is why the story point is necessary as it provides concepts regarding efforts, which are required, and also the complexity of the work.
Q14 What Is The Difference Between The Product And Sprint Backlog
This is a common Agile Scrum interview question. The differences between Product and Sprint are:
- Product Backlog lists all the items that need completion for the product development, whereas Sprint Backlog lists those items to be completed during one sprint.
- PB is collected by the product owner from the customer and assigned to the team. In comparison, SB is taken by the team from the product owner. They set a time duration to complete it.
- PB works on a specific goal, whereas sprint works on a specific sprint.
- PB is maintained by the product owner till the completion of the project, whereas SB is maintained by the team.
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How Are User Stories Epics And Tasks Different
- User Stories: They provide the team with simple explanations of the business requirements created from the end user’s perspective.
- Epics: An epic is a collection of related user stories. They are usually large and complex.
- Tasks: Tasks are used to break down user stories further. Theyre the smallest unit in Scrum that is used to track work. A person or a team of two people usually work on a task.
How Does The Agile Testing Methodology Differ From Other Testing Methodologies
Testers ensure that the whole process of testing is broken down into as small steps as possible, and just a small unit of code is tested in each of these steps. The team of testers consistently communicates the results of their work and changes the short-term strategy and even the development plan on the go, based on the results of the agile testing. The agile methodology encourages a flexible and rapid response to change, which leads to better end results.
If you have any doubts or queries related to DevOps, get them clarified from DevOps experts on our Agile Community.
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What Is Meant By Yesterdays Weather In An Agile Project
Yesterdays weather was the word for Extreme Programming to keep teams from becoming too complacent during running and batting times.
The story goes something like this. Once upon a time, a government spent a full amount of money on a satellite in the weather forecast. It took years. Million dollars cost. But in the end, they were able to launch a satellite that was able to accurately predict the weather at about 70% of the time. Not bad.
It is then that one realizes that if they say that todays weather will be the same as yesterdays, they will be 70% accurate.
XP uses this concept to keep teams from becoming too committed during sprints/iterations. It reminds us that the best prediction for the future is what we have done in the past.
