The Scrum Master Role as a Contradiction?
The Agile Manifesto infers people over processes. Isn’t a Scrum Master — whose role is meant to “enforce” the process — therefore a contradiction?
Scrum Masters do not wield any real authority but act as servant leaders. The Scrum Team does not report to them. This question is meant to help reveal whether your candidate understands that their role is to lead — as opposed to managing — the team. Asking this question is also likely to reveal why your candidate is interested in the role of a Scrum Master in the first place.
Acceptable answers should emphasize facilitation and support, for example:
“I am the servant-leader for the Scrum Team. It’s my job to make them successful.”
“I am neither a project manager nor a people manager. I support the Scrum Team in achieving self-organization. I do not tell people what to do.”
“I am the Scrum Team’s facilitator as teacher, coach, or mentor, encouraging them to excel as a team.”
How can you ensure that a Scrum Team has access to a product’s stakeholders?
When answering this question, your candidate should explain that there is no simple way to ensure access to stakeholders.
For example, in larger organizations, functional silos, budgeting and governance practices, and the organizational hierarchies often effectively limit team members’ access to stakeholders. Overcoming this organizational debt, thus building trust among all participants, is a prime objective for the work of Scrum Masters.
Your candidate might suggest encouraging stakeholders to engage in effective (transparent, helpful) communication. Sprint Reviews are a useful venue for this, and the interaction often promotes better relationships between different departments and business units.
What is the term velocity in Scrum?
Velocity is the average size of DONE requirements (Stories or any form of requirement) successfully delivered by the team every sprint in the past. Generally, it is calculated by averaging all the story points from the previous Sprints. It works as a guideline for the team to understand the number of stories they can do in a Sprint on an average.
Are you a Certified Scrum Master?
Scrum Masters play a veritable role in development and deployment of Software Projects. The need for Scrum Master is soaring high in the market with the evolution of Scrum Framework into much use.
The prerequisites and responsibilities of a Scrum Master are very broad. From managing the team and leading them to being an interface between the product owner and development team, the roles of Scrum Master needs to be configured and analysed very carefully.
To get yourself recognized as a good and expert Scrum Master one needs to get trained at first. Scrum Framework is a lightweight model but to master the model always remains a tough task to do. And so for the same one needs to get trained under an expert hand who delivers the exact concepts of Scrum Framework into use for the working process.
The trainers take you through every insight of how to deploy the principles of Scrum Framework into use. This includes covering all the activities and information needed for the role of Scrum Master with the depth knowledge of every section and stages. And so for the same getting yourself certified is a must need.
The certification of Scrum Master gives a detailed view of the structure and working of the Scrum Framework. It helps the Scrum Master to manage the team accordingly and deliver results of high-quality value.
Learning every single step under Scrum Certification course helps the Scrum Master to react to the blockages and backlogs very quickly and get this things resolved at an efficient pace.
With the growth and success of Scrum Framework into the working environment of Software industry with time, outlook and reach for Scrum Master has grown exponentially with time and demand for Scrum Masters are soaring high with the time.
What indicators might there be that demonstrate agile practices are working for your organization, and which of these would demonstrate your efforts are succeeding?
There is no standard or general definition of ‘agile success’ that can be used to measure an organization’s agility. Every organization must develop its own criteria. Increasing team velocity is usually not considered to be a meaningful indicator.
However, although mostly indirect, there are various indicators that may be useful in determining success:
Products delivered to customers are resulting in higher retention rates, better conversion rates, increased customer lifetime value, and similar improvements to the business. (A successful Scrum Team provides a good return on investment to the business.)
The improved organizational agility allows pursuing market opportunities successfully, which previously would have been considered futile.
There has been a reduced allocation of resources to low-value products.
Lead time, from validated idea to shipped product, has been reduced.
The cycle time for hypotheses validations has been reduced, speeding up the product discovery process.
Improved team happiness is exhibited by reduced churn and an increase in the number of referrals from team members.
Increased competitiveness in the war for talent can be demonstrated by an increase in the number of experienced people willing to join the organization.
Increased software quality can be demonstrated by measurably less technical debt, fewer bugs, and less time spent on maintenance.
There is greater respect among stakeholders for the product delivery teams.
Stakeholders are increasingly participating in events, for example, during the Sprint Review.
How do you promote an agile mindset across departmental boundaries and throughout an organization and, in pursuit of that, what is your strategy when coaching stakeholders not familiar with IT?
There are various tactics a Scrum Master can use to engage stakeholders with Scrum, for example:
Most importantly, a Scrum Master should live and breathe the principles of the Scrum Guide and the Agile Manifesto. They should talk to everyone in the organization involved in building the product, and they should be transparent about what they do. (Read more: 10 Proven Stakeholder Communication Tactics During an Agile Transition.)
Product and engineering teams can produce evidence proving to stakeholders that Scrum is significantly reducing the lead time from idea to product launch.
Product and engineering teams can demonstrate that Scrum mitigates risk (i.e. the forecast of when new features could be made available), thus contributing to other departments’ successes in planning and execution.
A Scrum Team can be transparent with respect to their work and proactively engage stakeholders by inviting them to Sprint Reviews and other events where the team communicates their activity or progress.
Training for everyone in the organization, particularly the stakeholders, is important. One hands-on approach is to organize workshops designed to teach agile techniques for non-technical colleagues.
What are the main tools you have used in a Scrum project?
Ideally, Scrum does not suggest or justify usage of tools but there are quite a few tools which helps Iterative implementation and those are
Simple Excel (Customized as per need)
Atlassian JIRA.
Version One.
RTC Jazz
Sprintster
What is the purpose of a Daily Scrum?
Daily Scrum is 15 minute sync up for the team which happens the same time – the same location every day. It helps the team self-organize towards their sprint goal and set the context for the day’s work. It is an inspect and adapt meeting where they inspect if the progress towards sprint goal is good and adapt if any changes required. This sync up event sets the tone for the day and reduced the need for any more meetings throughout the day.
Scrum Master makes sure this event happens and helps the team understand how to do a Daily Scrum effectively.
How would you prepare to kick-off transitioning to Scrum?
If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. Your candidate should understand that an agile transition needs to have an objective and a goal — which means planning ahead.
To prepare for kicking off a transition to Scrum is to listen and observe: your candidate should express interest in interviewing as many team members and stakeholders as possible, before jumping into action. These interviews should include everyone, no matter their role — engineers, QA professionals31, UX and UI designers, product managers — in order to identify the patterns underlying current problems, failures, and dysfunction within the organization. Merging those patterns with the most pressing technical and business issues will identify the most likely objectives for the first Scrum Teams. This observation phase, during which a Scrum Master performs their interviews, will typically require between four and twelve weeks depending upon the size and structure of the organization.
The training of future team members and stakeholders should commence and run parallel to the interviews.
Creating the first Scrum Teams from the existing engineering and product departments is the second step in kicking off a transition to Scrum.
Your candidate should be able to sketch the rough plan of a transition and address common issues that might arise during kickoff.
Who should be writing user stories?
Writing user stories should be a joint effort by all members of a Scrum Team—card, conversation, confirmation. If it’s not, the team might not feel that they have ownership of the work items — inevitably leading to less or no commitment, reduced motivation, and ultimately a lower-quality product. Additionally, handing down user stories reduces the accuracy of forecasts by the Development Team members as the joint creation process creates the shared understanding necessary.