Real-life scenarios questions from Scrum Master interviews

Questions about Real-World Situations

1. You have been just hired as a new Scrum Master. The team you’re going to work with doesn’t have any experience in Agile and is very skeptic about Scrum. They want to focus only on coding and don’t want to track their progress or attend any meetings. How do you influence and motivate them to use Scrum?

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2. Product Owner doesn’t have any experience in Agile methodologies. He used to manage Waterfall projects. He doesn’t want to participate actively in Scrum events like Sprint Planning, and Sprint Review and be available for Dev Team during Sprints. What would you do to make sure the Scrum process is being applied?

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3. You already performed Scrum training for stakeholders. After an initial phase of trying to apply the concepts, when first obstacles/hurdles are encountered, you see that these colleagues build serious resistance in continuing with Scrum adoption. What is your strategy/experience to handle such situations?

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4. The Product owner of your Scrum team tends to add ideas of all kind to the backlog to continue working on them at a later stage. Over time, this has lead to over 200 tickets in various stages. What is your take on that: Can the Scrum team work on 200 tickets?

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5. Your Dev Team works on a very legacy software project. Unfortunately, the team was set-up recently and don’t have appropriate knowledge about the old platform. So far, all Sprints have finished with very low velocity and without significant results. What would you do to help the team achieve success?

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6. A user story is lacking the final designs, but the design department promises to deliver on day #2 of the upcoming sprint. The product owner of your Scrum team is fine with that and pushed to have the user story in the sprint backlog. What is your take?

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7. The Product owner of your team normally turns stakeholder requirement documents into tickets and asks to estimate them. Are you okay with that procedure?

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8. The project is delayed three months/has lots of dependencies/based on old technology. Do you find this appealing/challenging for you? Have you worked in the similar situation?

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9. In case you receive a story on the last day of the sprint to test, and you find there are defects, what will you do? Will you mark the story to done?

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10. A team is always picking reasonable action items but is later not delivering on them. How do you handle this habit?

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11. The product owner chooses new features regularly and never picks bug fixes. In the end, the crashes have to be fixed, and the tech debt is growing. Those problems are slowing down testing and development. What would you do in short and in the mid-term?

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12. Your team approaches major release deadline and, as a result of the mid-iteration assessment, you realize that due to internal team reasons, release deadline has to be shifted significantly and this impacts marketing and other operational activities by the client which depend on product release date. How will you write an email notification to clients explaining the situation and your next steps ?