20 Questions from New Scrum Master to the

Development Team
1. Who is creating your Definition of ‘Done?’

2. How would you consider the level of technical debt?

3. Are you tracking the development of technical debt regularly?

4. How much time per Sprint do you allocate to refactoring and bug fixing?

5. How are you spreading knowledge among the Development Team members,
how are you improving your technical excellence level?

6. Do you have any skill gaps that would require formal training classes to
improve your team’s effectiveness?

7. Do you have the right tools available—software, hardware, cloud

applications—to accomplish the team’s mission?

8. Are you involved in the hiring process of new Development Team members?

9. At what stage do you participate in the product discovery process?

Copyright: Stefan Wolpers, Age-of-Product.com, 2020. All rights reserved. Page 1 of 2

10. Have you ever interviewed customers of our product to learn more about their
needs?

11. How often are you refining the Product Backlog?

12. On how many work items are you working in parallel during Product Backlog
refinement?

13. How long does the refinement of a typical work item take?

14. How are you creating work items? (Is it a joint team effort?)

15. How are you discussing work items? (Only during refinement sessions or also
on Slack or via comments on tickets, for example?)

16. Is your Product Owner changing work items once they become a part of a
Sprint Backlog? And if so, under what circumstances?

17. How are you estimating the likely effort of a Product Backlog item?

18. Are you estimating in man-hours or story points?

19. How are you practicing the estimation process if the team shares different
opinions?

20. What are the three main challenges the Development Team is facing today?

Copyright: Stefan Wolpers, Age-of-Product.com, 2020. All rights reserved. Page 2 of 2