Revolutionary Scrum Master Interview Questions You Must Know


Hi guys, in this blog post I am going to give you a lot of ideas of Scrum Master Interview Questions.
Some time ago, I wrote a couple of blog posts about the interview process that I went through when I applied for the positions of Scrum Master and Agile Coach.
Today I am writing something different, a resource that you will hopefully find useful.
I am constantly interviewing Agile Specialists in order to provide great Scrum Master Interview Questions. I will finish the article with a collection of questions that I have been accruing over several years and I believe they are extremely beneficial.
At the end you will find a collection of questions that I have been accruing over several years and I believe they are extremely beneficial.
Feel free to use them next time you are interviewing a candidate.
SCRUM MASTER INTERVIEW QUESTIONS


Questions:
1.What was the last book you read?Follow up questions:
2.What did you like most on that book / article.
3.How did you apply that learning in real life?
4.Why do you want to be a scrum master in our company?
5.How do you measure your success as a scrum master?


Questions:
1.Why should our company invest in becoming agile? What problem do we address with that? (Interesting to see how questions are raised to spot the companies current need and mapping it to the Agile knowledge)
2.Assume a stable team constellation with people working on tasks in isolation delivering every sprint what they promised. Time to interfere? (There can be quite a lot of dysfunctions in that setup. Let’s see what happens with further investigations)
3.What sources of learning do you use? What were recent learning activities? (Get the learning path and investments in staying up to date in a fastly growing agile world)
4.What were typical outcomes from your last retrospectives and how did you work with these outcomes? (Let’s learn about the strategy in retrospectives and ways to follow up results)
5.Where do you recommend using Scrum and when would you recommend not using it? (It’s not always a nail so you also not always need a hammer)
6.How do you know that your work is effective and efficient? (Is the difference clear? And how is success on both lanes measured?)


Questions:
1.Why did you become a Scrum Master?
2.What is the worst mistake you have made and what did you learn from it?
3.Scrum is a form of empirical process management. What was your last experiment about and what were your conclusions?
4.What would your team say they like and dislike about your service to them?
5.How do you usually go about causing change?


Questions:
1.Define me what an empirical process is
2.What is the difference between an iterative process and an incremental process
3.How can you manage risk with Scrum
4.How can you estimate an User Story? What types of estimates do you know? How about scales? And techniques?
5.Explain to me how story points works


Questions:
1. You have participated in the release planning --which ends on March-- with your Brazilian team. Everyone forgot about carnival (almost a week of partying). The client does not care about the carnival and is anxious about the release. What would you do as a ScrumMaster?
2. What is the difference between lead time and cycle time?
3. Velocity and throughput?
4. Do you prefer a burnup chart or a CFD? Why?
5. You must cancel a meeting this Sprint. Which one would you cancel? Retrospective, planning, review or grooming


Questions:
1.What is your Favourite retrospective technique and why?
2.How do you establish a teams new teams velocity?
3.What do you do for continuous learning and improvement?
4.You are assigned a new team and their velocity is a saw tooth.When you look closer at the delivery the story count is consistently the same number of stories.
5.What does servant leadership mean and give please give some examples how you have demonstrated it?


Questions:
1.How do you lead a team to the right answer? (i really like that one - could trigger so many different replies on different levels…)
2.When does it *not* make sense to use scrum?
3.What do you know from science that is relevant for your job?
4.Let’s design an experiment for
5.From your opinion, what is the point of the daily scrum? Why do you think it's important?


Questions:
1.Role Play: I am a C-Level Manager. We have considered to hire a ScrumMaster to help us implement Scrum. Given you have 3 Minutes, how would you respond to that?
2.Please explain servant leadership. How do you lead as a Scrum Master?
3.What are the main capabilities a good Scrum Master should have?
4.Why do we need Agile or Scrum at all?
5. So if we implement the Scrum roles and ceremonies etc. we are agile?


Questions:
1.What is the connection between Empiric Process Control and the Scrum meetings?
2.One of the team members of your team hates Scrum and kills the team spirit. What do you do?
3.What values are important if you want to establish Scrum?
4.What have been the last things you failed to change though you wanted to?
5.How do you recover if things have gone really bad?


Questions
1.If you could spend a week with anyone, dead or alive, who would that be and why?
2.There are various reasons why people talk more or less than others, also e.g. depending on the situation at hands. How would you explain it to be important for people to talk the same amount during retrospectives? How would you explain it is not important?
3.Please give three examples when it is a good idea to let a stakeholder, for example your own direct manager, to prioritize the work of the Scrum Team without going through the PO?
4.You believe one team member is not very productive. In fact, you checked and there are close-to-zero commits from the person during the past 3 Sprints. What will you do about it and how?
5.Please fill up the blanks:
As a ScrumMaster,
I want ______________
So that _____________.


Questions:
1. If you have to select only one element of Scrum, what would it be and why?
2. What is the No.1 reason agile transitions fail?
3. Describe the role of a Scrum Master in an elevator pitch.
4. Why is Scrum Master a full-time role?
5. Please create an agenda for a Sprint Retrospective.


Questions
1.How do you know if you are doing well as Scrum Master?
2.This is your first week as Scrum Master in a new company/customer, what is the single most important thing during this week? Why?
3.Describe me your first week in that new company/customer as Scrum Master
4.Your team is not implementing agreed actions as result of retrospectives. What do you do?
5.Your new assignment as Scrum Master consists of a new virtual team distributed across different countries with people that has never worked together before. What do you do?


Questions
1.When did you decide to become a Scrum Master?
2.Have you ever worked in parallel as a Scrum Master with other roles like Product Owner, Developer, or a tester? if you answer is yes, tell me why and what is your feedback from that?
3.Tell me what mistake have you done as a Scrum Master?
4.What was the last book you read about Agile?
5.What would you do when a manager wants to add more user stories to the backlog in the middle of Sprint?


Questions:
<br /><strong>1.</strong>How would you help the team’s members find their role within the team?<br /><strong>2.</strong>How would you help the team to find a strong sense of purpose?<br /><strong>3.</strong>How would you help the team to maintain ideal Scrum Ceremonies?<br /><strong>4.</strong>How would you help the team to act as a team, and not just a bunch of individuals?<br /><strong>5.</strong>How would you help the team to Surface and Resolve Conflicts?<br /><strong>6.</strong>How would you help each individual to1 get better at what they do?<br /><strong>7.</strong>How would you help the team to raise the bar, so as to help them to continuously improve?<br /><strong>8.</strong>How would you help the team to identify possible improvements in their Engineering practices?<br /><strong>9.</strong>How would you help the team to establish effective team communication skills?<br /><strong>10.</strong>How would you encourage self-organisation within your team?<br /><strong>11.</strong>)Are you aware of the 5 dysfunctions of a team, and can you create exercises to improve them?<br /><strong>12.</strong>How will you help the team to spread knowledge gained during development?<br /><strong>13.</strong>How would you coach the whole team to collaborate? (Give examples…)<br /><strong>14.</strong Can you give examples that show that you allow the team to find their own answers instead of you giving them?<br /><strong>15.</strong>Are you focused on business value delivery? Give me examples of how you accomplish this.<br /><strong>16.</strong>How would you help and encourage everyone to express their opinions?<br /><strong>17.</strong>How would you help the team in identifying positive and negative changes during retrospectives?<br /><strong>18.</strong>How would you encourage team learning (fostering collaborative practices, pair programming, continuous integration, collective code ownership, short design sessions, specifications workshops, etc.)?<br /><strong>19.</strong> How would you encourage rotation in technical areas of concern: functionality, components/layers, roles, aspects, etc.?<br /><strong>20.</strong> How would you help the team in setting long term operating goals for all team members: agile practices to master, new skills to acquire, etc.?<br /><strong>21.</strong> How would you examine what is missing in order to make the environment better for everyone?<br /><strong>22.</strong> How would you prioritise improvement activities and make them happen?<br /><strong>23.</strong> How would you help the team to find access to external sources of information?<br /><strong>24.</strong> How would you help the team to find techniques to help them be more collaborative?<br /><strong>25.</strong> How would you encourage and facilitate open communication among the team members and with external colleagues?<br /><strong>26.</strong> How would you help and encourage healthy conflict during team meetings?<br /><strong>27.</strong> How would you help the team to mature their DoD?<br /><strong>28.</strong> How would you help the team create transparency and urgency around continuous system integration?<br /><strong>29.</strong> How would you help encourage the team to create small automated acceptance tests at the beginning and evolve from there?<br /><strong>30.</strong> How would you help encourage the team to coach each other in TDD, refactoring, and simple design?<br /><strong>31.</strong> How would you help encourage the team to use human-readable acceptance tests?<br /><strong>32.</strong> How would you help encourage the team to do pair and peer reviews?<br />
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Great compilation btw
Surely a great compilation of questions. I would be grateful to you if you could send your expert views on answering these questions please?
All excellent questions, Can you provide guidance / suggest the answers to these? it will help in learning a lot.
Some interesting questions, but you couldn’t find even one women agile coach, trainer, or scrum master to contribute? That must have been disappointing.
Sad to see that our work in this field is invisible.
Hi Amber, would you like to contribute? 🙂
Thanks 🙂
Luis
Luis, there are some html tags in the last set of questions (written by yourself) visible on the webpage. It is hard to read.
1.How would you help the team’s members find their role within the team?
2.How would you help the team to find a strong sense of purpose?
3.How would you help the team to maintain ideal Scrum Ceremonies?
4.How would you help the team to act as a team, and not just a bunch of individuals?
5.How would you help the team to Surface and Resolve Conflicts?
6.How would you help each individual to1 get better at what they do?
7.How would you help the team to raise the bar, so as to help them to continuously improve?
8.How would you help the team to identify possible improvements in their Engineering practices?
9.How would you help the team to establish effective team communication skills?
10.How would you encourage self-organisation within your team?
11.)Are you aware of the 5 dysfunctions of a team, and can you create exercises to improve them?
12.How will you help the team to spread knowledge gained during development?
13.How would you coach the whole team to collaborate? (Give examples…)
14.15.Are you focused on business value delivery? Give me examples of how you accomplish this.
16.How would you help and encourage everyone to express their opinions?
17.How would you help the team in identifying positive and negative changes during retrospectives?
18.How would you encourage team learning (fostering collaborative practices, pair programming, continuous integration, collective code ownership, short design sessions, specifications workshops, etc.)?
19. How would you encourage rotation in technical areas of concern: functionality, components/layers, roles, aspects, etc.?
20. How would you help the team in setting long term operating goals for all team members: agile practices to master, new skills to acquire, etc.?
21. How would you examine what is missing in order to make the environment better for everyone?
22. How would you prioritise improvement activities and make them happen?
23. How would you help the team to find access to external sources of information?
24. How would you help the team to find techniques to help them be more collaborative?
25. How would you encourage and facilitate open communication among the team members and with external colleagues?
26. How would you help and encourage healthy conflict during team meetings?
27. How would you help the team to mature their DoD?
28. How would you help the team create transparency and urgency around continuous system integration?
29. How would you help encourage the team to create small automated acceptance tests at the beginning and evolve from there?
30. How would you help encourage the team to coach each other in TDD, refactoring, and simple design?
31. How would you help encourage the team to use human-readable acceptance tests?
32. How would you help encourage the team to do pair and peer reviews?