How does the Scrum Master serve the organization?
By helping in Scrum adoption in the organization.
Acting as a catalyst and change agent for Scrum adoption in Org.
Catalyzing changes that can help the team, be more productive sprint by sprint.
Fostering culture of continuous improvement sprint by sprint in team and organization.
Supporting Agile leadership principles, leading to organizational transformation.
Helping other Scrum Masters to increase the effectiveness of Scrum implementation in their teams and organization.
How does the Scrum Master help the Product Owner?
Product Owner is served by Scrum master in the following ways:
Make sure goals, scope & product domain are understood by everyone on the Scrum Team as well as possible;
Helping the Scrum Team understand the need for clear and concise Product Backlog items;
Finding techniques for effective Product Backlog management; eg – different Prioritization techniques like MoSCoW & Requirement breaking and Business value allocation techniques
Helping know how to do product planning in an empirical situation;
Making sure that Product Owner knows the ways to arrange the Product Backlog to maximize product & business value
Understanding and practicing agility &
Facilitating Scrum events as requested or needed. (Makes sure events happen and inappropriate way & help course correction & coach if required)
How would you introduce Scrum to senior executives?
This is a deliberately open question meant to encourage discussion. In answering this question, your candidate should elaborate on how they would spread an agile mindset throughout an organization or, ideally, and more specifically, how they would create a learning organization that embraces experimentation in order to identify the best product for its customers.
A good candidate is likely to talk about the necessity of ‘selling’ agile to the organization in order to win the hearts and minds of the stakeholders. They will also point at the necessity to find a high-ranking executive to sponsor the transformation.
At the beginning of a transition any organization shows inertia to change, so to overcome this resistance executives and stakeholders need to know how Scrum will benefit them before they’re likely to make a commitment. (Read more: The Big Picture of Agile: How to Pitch the Agile Mindset to Stakeholders.)
One practical approach when introducing Scrum to senior executives is to organize workshops for higher management levels. Applying Scrum at the executive level has been successful in the past. Executives, and potentially even key directors, can gain first-hand experience with agile practices if organized as a Scrum Team.
There is no right or wrong answer to this question. Good practices need to take into consideration an organization’s culture, size, product maturity, legal and compliance requirements, and the industry it is operating in.
How do you facilitate user story selection in a way that the most valuable stories are chosen without overruling the Development Team’s prerogative to select the Sprint Backlog?
If a Development Team is involved early enough in either user story selection (preferably by jointly creating the stories with the Product Owner) or product discovery, a Scrum Master will probably not need to provide any guidance to see that the most valuable stories are chosen.
If a Development Team resorts to cherry-picking — choosing user stories only to satisfy personal preferences — during Sprint Planning, the Product Backlog refinement process needs to be seriously inspected. In all likelihood, the Product Owner is probably focusing on Product Backlog items that are not maximizing customer value.
Would you recommend formal Daily Scrums for all teams, no matter the size or experience level?
In answering this question, your candidate should exhibit common sense regarding “ritualized” Daily Scrums. Daily Scrums are an important part of Scrum, but not all Daily Scrums need to be formal — a Development Team should not have a Daily Scrum for the sake of having it; it serves a different purpose than ticking off a box on a checklist. A small, experienced, and co-located team may use a morning coffee break for their Daily Scrum.
Nevertheless, the Daily Scrum is the essential inspect & adapt event of the Development Team: are we still on track accomplishing the Sprint Goal? Or have we learned something since the previous Daily Scrum that requires to change our plan of how to achieve the Sprint Goal?
Can you draw an example of a Scrum Team’s Kanban board — right now?
In this question, the qualifier ‘Kanban’ is used as a teaser. Anyone interviewing for the role of Scrum Master should be able to draw a simple Sprint board.
The columns of a Sprint board should usually include columns such as:
Backlog of tasks,
Task In progress,
Code review,
Quality assurance,
Done.
Additional information may be included on or attached to any kind of board:
Scrum Team members,
Sprint or event dates,
Definition of “Done,”
A burndown chart (progress and work remaining over time),
A parking lot (topics for future discussion).
Your candidate should mention that a Scrum Master is not obliged to provide the Scrum Team with a Sprint board. A board is the responsibility of the Development Team working with it. The Scrum Master should, however, support the effort with an introductory workshop on the subject if no member of the team is familiar with offline boards.
Would you recommend following up on action items? If so, how would you do that?
The Scrum Team is self-organizing. However, there are always moments when working on improving its practices is less of a Scrum Team’s priority. In this situation, a Scrum Master should follow up on the action items — tasks to be done — that members of a Scrum Team pick during their team’s Sprint Retrospective to remember everyone that Scrum is not working without self-organization.
A good way for a Scrum Master to do this is to start talking about the status of the action items picked during the last Sprint Retrospective before picking new ones by initiating a discussion at the beginning of each new Sprint Retrospective. (Note: This is not meant to be a reporting session but practical help to get self-organization going with the Scrum Team.)
Suppose this discussion uncovers action items picked during a previous Sprint Retrospective that haven’t been completed as expected. In that case, the team needs to understand why this happened and offer its support to prevent it from happening again.
What do you recommend a newly formed Scrum team works on first?
The first critical issue for the majority of newly formed Scrum Teams is the existing legacy Product Backlog. Answers to this question need not reference Tuckman’s team development stages (see Question 28), additional team-building exercises, or any kind of Scrum training or workshop not concerned with the Product Backlog.
It is a rare occasion for a Scrum Master to start from scratch with a brand new team and no existing product — even more so in a nascent organization like a startup. Most often, it’s an existing product delivery organization with existing products and services that will ‘go agile’. For these cases, your candidate should point out that refining the legacy Product Backlog is the practical first step.
The legacy Product Backlog per se is an interesting artifact because it provides a comprehensive insight into the product delivery organization’s history: this particular Product Backlog allows for identifying organizational debt, process insufficiencies, questionable product decisions, and other anti-patterns.
Looking at a legacy Product Backlog, an excellent candidate will be able to point out some of these anti-patterns (e.g. outdated or poorly maintained tickets), and provide a good idea about how to transform the legacy Product Backlog into a well-refined, current Product Backlog such that a new Scrum Team could work with.
Candidates should mention that running Product Backlog refinement workshops creates a good opportunity to provide a new Scrum Team and Product Owner hands-on training with Scrum. This is because a Product Backlog refinement workshop will typically cover user story creation, knowledge transfer among team members, the estimation process (if applicable), introductory agile metrics, technical debt analysis, and other topics critical to the success of Scrum.
What is time boxing in Scrum?
Time boxing means allotting a fixed unit of time for an activity. So the time is over activity is over – irrespective of the result. This brings in discipline, predictability and creates a situation for inspect and adapt. Every event in Scrum is time boxed which Must not be extended like Sprint, Daily Scrum etc.
Can we apply Kanban in place of Scrum?
Philosophies behind both frameworks are quite different. Kanban believes in delivering as soon as possible and it does not have time boxes like Sprints. However, Scrum believes in Time box oriented free collaboration among team members to come out with innovative solutions and work items. Scrum does not believe in Silos however Kanban may have silos.
Kanban focuses on WORK and Scrum focuses on Collaborative interaction among team members. Scrum speaks about mandatory roles and responsibilities however Kanban do not speak anything on roles so the implementation aspects are different.
• TO DO: You can do TKP (Team Kanban Practitioner Certification) and KMP1 (Kanban Management Professional) or KMP2 certification courses to know more on KANBAN and CSM (Certified Scrum Master Certification) or LSM certification courses to learn more or if you can spend time read books and try implementation