Behavioral Interview Questions

As with all Behavioral questions, there is no right and wrong answer. The interviewer is trying to see
how you functioned in Agile framework and how was your experience. Try to give concrete and clear
answers for Behavioral questions. Follow STAR approach to answer them – Situation, Task, Action,
Result.

Below I have listed some behavior questions and written how they could be approached but they are my
opinion. Feel free to share your own experiences and opinions even if they are different than mine.

1) Can you tell a situation when you removed impediment from team’s way.

One of the roles of Scrum master is to remove impediment from team’s way of achieving sprint goal.
Think of one such time and the impact it had on the overall result. It could be a resource constraint or
detailing requirements from the business or providing essential training to team members.

2) How do you spread Agile mindset in the organization?

Here the interviewer is trying to check your involvement in the organization as an Agile leader or Scrum
Master. Highlight from your experience how you were involved in taking your organization in agile
direction. If it never happened in your past experience, simulate a situation in your mind and try to
prepare the answer. Hint – I would go from organization present problems and how Agile (or Scrum)
could overcome them.

3) What will you do when team members are not updating the tasks?

You need to go to the root cause of issue. May be updating task is not simple and needs extra logins,
may be the team doesn’t know how it affects the burndown chart, may be they don’t know how it could
be useful for them. Once you have evaluated the real reason, you can act on it.

4) How do you handle a situation when someone “leads” standups, and makes it a status meeting?

Make the team aware that Standup meetings are not status meetings. It’s for the whole team to
synchronize and not to report to any one individual. If the team has started giving you the status
meetings, try to stay behind during standup meeting and observe from distance. Again, you might have
handled the situation differently and you can share your experience with the interviewer.

5) What should you do if your Scrum team is consistently failing to meet sprint goal?

You need to analyze burndown chart and find the reason. If the scope is consistent and no more work is
added into the Sprint, then may be estimation is not done properly. Bring it up during the retrospective
meeting as a bad smell and see what the team has to say in action items.

6) Product Owner doesn’t know agile and comes from a waterfall project background. He doesn’t attend
planning meetings with the team. How will you make sure he follows Scrum processes.

Again, there’s no right answer. Normally product owner’s have gone through Scrum training and are
aware of the process. But talking to them about it – how the team wants him to explain the Sprint goal
and the user stories and give them clear priorities would help.
7) Product Owner keeps adding work-items in between sprint which makes sprint backlog big and sprint
goal is not achieved. Development team is hesitant to say something. This has resulted in stress
environment and team is in general de-motivated. How would you help the team?

You need to analyze few past burndown charts and observe why sprint goal is not being achieved. What
is the nature of these work items that are added in between sprint? Some work-items like production
issues are urgent and need to be added to the sprint. They cannot be estimated during planning
meetings, but such workload can be anticipated. It should be considered during capacity planning before
the sprint starts. If, however, the nature of user stories added is normal work then need to figure out
what’s wrong – Sprint goal is not clear or priority is not well defined, would smaller sprints be better to
make sure scope doesn’t change. If you could give a specific example from your experience, that would
be great.

8) A particular team member has a habit of picking up high-priority user stories but not delivering them
on time. This leads to late detection of defects and last-minute code fixes. What will you do to help this
situation?

If its impacting the project work, it should be talked about in retrospective meeting. Remember there’s
no finger pointing so you should talk about the last-minute code fixes and highlight that you think its
because of working late on user stories, there might be other points from rest of the team. Once the
point is put forward the team member will receive the message. If the behavior continues, you could
always ask him/her in one-on-one meeting and highlight where he/she is going wrong.

9) Your stakeholders have received Scrum training, however while working they sometimes overlook
scrum processes. Instead of giving work in smaller chunks, they give it in a functional document with a
long list of work. How will you handle this situation?

Emphasize the need of having requirements as User story and how it will be helpful for the team to
estimate them in smaller chunks and more value could be delivered. Creating user stories could be tricky
for some, lead them by example by breaking the functional document into User stories yourself.

10) You don’t have enough user stories in “Ready” state to start your next sprint. What would you do?

Even though you don’t have enough user stories, you have some that are ready. You can define a sprint
goal and start work with whatever you have, for the one’s not ready you could use the high level or
approximate estimations. During the sprint ones more User stories are ready you can add them to sprint.
Or, alternatively this could be an opportunity for you to work on technical debt or do a POC or create
some automation scripts.