12 Scrum Master Interview Questions of Real-World Situations

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Looking to hire a Scrum Master?

Interviewing candidates is no easy task because Scrum Master responsibilities go far beyond the Scrum processes set up.

When you embed real-world situations in the Scrum Master interview questions, the hiring process becomes more efficient.

An experienced Scrum Master can make a huge difference in the dynamics and performance of an Agile team. However, with the broader Scrum adoption, there are some poorly trained specialists out there who do not fully understand Scrum.

Hire one of those and chances are your team will be demotivated and reject Scrum.

“Сhose a Scrum Master during the interview using questions about real-world situations.” Artem Borodin, CSP-SM, Scrum Alliance Certified, PMP.

12 Questions about Real-World Situations: 

Situational questions are an essential part of the interview process in assessing candidates who will be a good fit for an open Scrum Master job. Here are 12 real-world situations to discuss during an interview.

Dive deeper into the discussion of each situation when possible asking open questions like “why would you do that?”, “what is your desired outcome?”, “what if nothing changes?”, etc.

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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

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?

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. Please write an email notification to clients explaining the situation and your next steps.

Do you want to ask for Artem’s advice? Here’s his profile at Standuply Mentors, reach out directly to me for any help you may need.

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM]

I like and agree with all your questions.  I see one downside, time. I can see this interview going on for hours if the interviewee has meaningful answers for each question. 

I'd pick 5 of these to ask in my first round interview, if they make it past that, I would have them do a second round with another employee.  But no more than two rounds, otherwise you are wasting both your time and worse, the interviewee's.