32 Scrum master interview questions to test your candidates
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. Those were really interesting interviews, and they can be found here. Today I am writing something different, a resource that you will hopefully find useful.
I am providing 32 Scrum Master Interview Questions that anyone can use to interview Scrum Masters. This is a collection of questions that I have been accruing over several years and I believe they are extremely beneficial; please feel free to use them next time you are interviewing a candidate.
Scrum master interview questions
- How would you help the team’s members find their role within the team?
- How would you help the team to find a strong sense of purpose?
- How would you help the team to maintain ideal Scrum Ceremonies?
- How would you help the team to act as a team, and not just a bunch of individuals?
- How would you help the team to Surface and Resolve Conflicts?
- How would you help each individual to get better at what they do?
- How would you help the team to raise the bar, so as to help them to continuously improve?
- How would you help the team to identify possible improvements in their Engineering practices?
- How would you help the team to establish effective team communication skills?
- How would you encourage self-organisation within your team?
- Are you aware of the 5 dysfunctions of a team, and can you create exercises to improve them?
- How will you help the team to spread knowledge gained during development?
- How would you coach the whole team to collaborate? (Give examples…)
- Can you give examples that show that you allow the team to find their own answers instead of you giving them?
- Are you focused on business value delivery? Give me examples of how you accomplish this.
- How would you help and encourage everyone to express their opinions?
- How would you help the team in identifying positive and negative changes during retrospectives?
- How would you encourage team learning (fostering collaborative practices, pair programming, continuous integration, collective code ownership, short design sessions, specifications workshops, etc.)?
- How would you encourage rotation in technical areas of concern: functionality, components/layers, roles, aspects, etc.?
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.? - How would you examine what is missing in order to make the environment better for everyone?
- How would you prioritise improvement activities and make them happen?
- How would you help the team to find access to external sources of information?
- How would you help the team to find techniques to help them be more collaborative?
- How would you encourage and facilitate open communication among the team members and with external colleagues?
- How would you help and encourage healthy conflict during team meetings?
- How would you help the team to mature their DoD?
- How would you help the team create transparency and urgency around continuous system integration?
- How would you help encourage the team to create small automated acceptance tests at the beginning and evolve from there?
- How would you help encourage the team to coach each other in TDD, refactoring, and simple design?
- How would you help encourage the team to use human-readable acceptance tests?
- How would you help encourage the team to do pair and peer reviews?
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Hello there, first of all i find your blog very insightfull , great work especially for the fact that you find the time from your daily routine to add your Scrum / Agile experiences and share them withthe world. In terms your questions what type of adequate answers would you provide to the interviewing party?
thanks again
Regards,
Tom
Hi Tom,
There are not right or wrong answers for it :) those questions are used to test people mentality ;)
In any case in future blogs I will provide some answers for some of the questions, then I will put them here.
Big thanks for your nice words,
Luis
Hi, really great set of questions. I am a CSM but I have never worked as one. I am applying for a CSM post but before that I would like to know the answers to all these questions. Its not just to clear the exam but would like to know more on the roles and responsibilities handling mechanisms. Could any one please share the same?
Regards
Sri
And how can I get the answers
Using your brain and come up with some ;) ;) ;)
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“How would you…” tends to get hypothetical, abstract answers. Instead, I’d suggest either behavioural requests, “Tell me about a time when…”, and/or simulation, “This is the situation… describe how you are thinking through and responding to it.”
Thanks :) Nice comment.
Amazing set of questions! Trying to answer them all is not an easy task, and really makes you think in about the processes behind what, most of the times, at least for me, are empirical processes.
It helped me figuring out what I’m doing right, but most importantly, what I’ve been doing wrong!!
Thanks for the sharing.
Obrigado Ana :)
Sempre às ordens ;)
Luis
Nice set of questions. I would add few questions about working with organisation not only the team.
Thanks :) Feel free to add them on the comments ;)
Hi all,
Im being cheeky here but do you have answers to these questions as well? Im a total beginner on Scrum and taking my course in January, bought the Scrum Quickstart Guide book. Any helps, tips, suggestions are greatly appreciated x
Goknur
No Answers :) This is something to make you think about :) There is no right or wrong answer :) all the best
Typically I like to ask questions that directly address their personal experience rather than knowledge.
For instance, instead of asking:
“How would you help the team’s members find their role within the team?”
I ask:
“Give me an example of a time you effectively helped the team’s members find their role within the team.”
A lot of people talk it but fewer have walked it. This format will provide insight into their knowledge as well as how they recognize situations, define tasks, take action and track results (STAR)..
Very good insight Dean.
Highly appreciated :)
Luis
It would be useful if there were some sort of categorization of these questions that distinguished between levels, such as entry-level, intermediate, advanced and expert. This is one possible categorization. Every practicing Scrum Master is not at the expert level, and the whole team is on a learning journey, including the Scrum Master.
Hi, maybe something that you could do Warren ;) if you do that let me know so that I can share ;)
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I have liked a number of your posts so I thought I would sign up. At the same time this one does not thrill me. In my mind it is a waterfall approach to hiring not an Agile approach hiring.
I go with far fewer and more open questions in the direction of:
- What are the most important dynamics of a team that you would prioritize developing and how would you develop them?
- What are the most difficult issues that come up in teams and how do you address them?
I want to learn if the candidate can bring up the important ideas. And I want to learn new things that might be important that I missed. I don’t want to spoonfeed the candidate what is most important.
As a candidate I feel like I could game these questions really easy. If I knew nothing about the importance of say constructive conflict, being asked the quest I would learn it is important to the interviewer and could then invent a solution on the spot even though I had no idea it was important until I was asked. I would rather get the candidate to tell me the important dynamics AND tell me how they would address them.
The questions I see above I would consider more of a checklist. Did the candidate bring up the importance of constructive conflict? Did the candidate think about how team members fill different roles? Etc.
I want people to work for me who can come up with the important points as well as execute towards their success. I don’t want people who will just find a solution to the problem I present as important. I also assume that people I may hire have ideas that are important that I did not think about. I want to tease those ideas out and learn. If I cannot learn something from a new hire do I really want to hire them?
It feels so waterfall: Here are all the things we require of a Scrum Master. We have pre-determined, by our up-front analysis, these are THE set of RIGHT things that will lead to a complete Scrum Master solution. After the candidate is hired and implements these up-front requirements I will test the candidate (performance review) to see if they lived up to all the requirements I delivered upfront. It does not feel like an Agile approach of asking how the person is going to self-organize and what they will look at in the process of helping the team self organize. An approach that requires the candidate to creatively generate problems and solutions around optimizing value feels much more agile.
You have a lot of valuable questions here, and they will make it very clear to the candidate what your specific requirements for a Scrum Master are. You have a clear set of practices you expect the team to follow, and are looking for a Scrum Master who “executes” on that expectation.
I suggest adding a questions about sustainable pace (how to help the team to avoid working overtime), about helping the team to hire new people, and about how to keep the team happy.
However, I feel that before getting into that kind of detail with a candidate, I need to allow them space to present themselves, so I always ask them these two questions:
“In a typical sprint, you have x hours at your disposal, how do you usually invest them.”
From the answer I learn a lot about the person’s idea of the role of a Scrum Master, about their skills, challenges and values.
The next question “In your opinion, what are the characteristics of a successful team, and for each of them, how would you help the team realize their potential”.
Again, there’s a lot to learn form that question. There’s interesting conversations to be had from pointing out possible conflicts with the answer to the first question.
After these two questions I ask for specific stuff the candidate did not mention but is important to me, mostly because usually the team has impediments in some areas I want to be taken care of.
I think for that part of the conversation I will use your set of questions in the future.
Thank you so much for your comments Bernhard :) Super interesting and nice comments :)
Thanks - the list is a good resource, however a wrong one if in inappropriate hands. Consider the countless number of checklists/questions the HR are using to interview candidates only to make it feel like a one way interrogation instead of discussion and finding out if the candidate fits with their human and social skills … It should come up with disclaimer: ”Before use, please make effort to understand the meaning behind these questions” ;)
My friend you will never be able to get rid of bad people :) And if they are bad people does not matter what questions they have, they will screw it up in any way ;)
Great set of questions Louis. Most of them, as they should be, are focused on the Scrum Master being a facilitator rather than a take-charge person. The Scrum Master ideally nurtures an environment where he merely provides observations and suggestions and the team is responsible to become a “high-performing” team.
I have posted some links on well-known facilitation techniques from the behavioral sciences field, that have helped me in tremendously over the years [http://blog.sridharj.com/2014/02/10/facilitation-scrummasters/]. I hope they will be useful to some of your readers too
Thank you so much ;)