Agile Interview Questions And Answers

When attending an Agile interview, you may wonder what type of Agile interview questions and answers the employers will ask you. This is why it is essential to get an idea of the different types of questions you may ask when attending the interview. We all commonly get a bit nervous when attending interviews, regardless of how experienced we are in the field. It is another reason you should do some research and brush up on your skills by learning about the interview question you may ask.

Agile interview questions and answers comprise the Agile Methodology’s top aspects. In this article, we will let you know the tough and easiest agile interview question and answers for freshers so that you can secure a high-paying job.

Agile Methodology is the process of methods and practices in which software development and project management occur for delivering customer-centric products in the short development cycle known as the sprints. Generally, it is the iterative approach, and each iteration is manageable and small so you can deliver them in a specific period.

Know More About Agile

Agile methodologies are open to changing needs over time and encourage constant feedback from their end-users. It is a popular method as customers involves in this process to update them with all the information about their products. It also ensures whether you meet the customers’ requirements or not.

Businesses are inclining towards agile so they can easily refer to the changes in the marketplace or customer feedback without wasting their years’ worth of plans. Enough planning and shipping in frequent and small increments will make your team garner effective information on all the changes in the market and make better plans for business growth at more affordable prices.

With the help of the agile team, who share the same vision, it will bring life to how they handle and provide their services. Each Agile team member has standards for completeness, usability, and quality.

The Agile software development process usually initiates by defining the users for the particular product or documenting a vision statement for the scope of problems, opportunities, and values that you need to address. The product owner will capture the vision and work with a multidisciplinary team to work on it. The need for Agile professionals is increasing daily; becoming an Agile expert has become quite necessary to get a high-paying job. Let us look at some of the top Agile interview questions and answers for beginners to brush up on their skills.

What are the other agile frameworks?

There are several agile frameworks including – Scrum, Feature-Driven Development, Crystal, Kanban, Test-Driven Development.

What is scrum?

Scrum is a framework that inspires the team to learn through experiences, effectively work together on a problem, and reflect on the profit while constantly improving. You use scrum to make a set of meetings, tools, and roles to effectively make the structure of the team and manage them.

What are the basic similarities between Agile and Scrum?

Agile helps to complete projects with the following steps (step by step) and is also incremental and iterative in nature. Just like agile, scrum also follows the iterative and incremental way in terms of functioning.

What are the basic differences between Agile and Scrum?

Explain ‘scrum of scrums’ in brief.

Let five teams are working on the same project and each team consists of five members. Each of these five teams is leading their specific scrum meeting. In order to coordinate with another team, you need to organize another meeting. You can call this meeting as scrum of scrums. As an instance – a CEO represents its team in the scrum of scrums.

What do you mean by release candidate?

During the final stage of development, a code, version, or build is made available for public consumption. This is what is referred to as a “release candidate,” and its purpose is to guarantee that no significant issues have been overlooked. Testing completes on this version, which is functionally equivalent to the final product.

For how long a scrum lifecycle can exist?

Scrum is for teams of ten or fewer members. The life cycle of scrum generally depends on project size and team size. Team members break the whole work into parts that completes within a specific time iteration called sprints. It takes 3-4 weeks to complete each scrum.

What does it mean by Test-driven Development?

Test-driven Development (TDD) is an agile framework that can style programs in three different activities: coding, testing, and design. TDD helps to improve design qualities in code and delivers a technical quality for improving cohesion and coupling.

Define the “build-breaker” in brief.

When software has a bug on it, the build-breaker situation occurs. Due to the presence of such an uncertain bug, execution of software is failed and a warning is generated. Hence, the software testing team will involve getting back the software into the normal working stage removing the bug.

When should you use Waterfall over Scrum?

Usually, you use Waterfall when the requirements are simple, fully defined, predictable, and understood, and will not change.

Mention different strategies to maintain agile qualities.

Here are some agile quality strategies:

1. Iteration
2. Dynamic code analysis
3. Standards and guidelines
4. Milestone reviews
5. Short feedback cycles
6. Reviews and inspection

What is the drawback of the agile model?

The drawbacks of the agile model are as follow:

• It cannot predict the effort that is needed to complete a task. In the case of large projects, it is very difficult to estimate the total required efforts.
• Several times it is challenging to focus on the design and documentation of a project.
• If the requirements of clients are not understood, the final project cannot meet the customer requirements. Hence, the Company may face customer dissatisfaction.

What are zero sprints in agile?

Zero sprints are the preparation step of the first sprint in agile. Before starting the project, there are a few activities that you need to do. These activities are zero sprints. As an instance – setting the environment to perform development, preparing for backlogs, etc.

What do you understand about the spike in agile?

Spike is considered as a story type that must be considered between the sprints. You can use spikes for performing different functions associated with design or technical issues (just like research, design, prototyping, development). There are two types of spikes – functional spikes and technical spikes.

What does scrum master do?

In a scrum team, a leader or coach is present as the name of a scrum master. A scrum master is responsible for serving and protecting the scrum team to improve their performance.  He makes a well-organized and influential team where all members focus on implementing agile, scrum principles, and applications.

What are the basic qualities a professional agile tester must-have?

A good professional agile tester must have:

• Quick understanding of the necessities.
• Knowledge of agile principles and concepts.
• The ability to establish good communication with developers, testers, and associates.  
• As the requirements change constantly, the tester must understand the risks involved in this stage.

Explain the role of a story point in the scrum.

A story point is a scrum unit that you use to estimate the required efforts to finish or implement a particular task.

What do you mean by scrum ban?

Scrum ban is a software development framework that depends on Scrum and Kanban. This framework is for projects that have frequent maintenance, consisting of user stories and programming errors. With the presence of this approach, you can guide the workflow of the team in a manner to allow minimum completion time in case of each user story or programming error.

What is the role of continuous integration in agile?

Continuous integration plays a vital role in agile –

• It ensures the quality and bug-free state of the code-base.
• It is for maintaining the release schedule on time by time and detecting bugs.
• As agile code is delivered frequently in every sprint of 2-3 weeks, continuous integration ensures the stable quality of building code.
• It also helps to determine the impact of performance on branches.

In which process a Scrum master recommends follow-up action items?

The finest way to follow up on action items is to establish a follow-up of the work to be done by the team members. And the scrum master will collect this information.

What are the benefits of using scrum?

Scrum plays three roles such as Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Team. Here are the brief explanation of each role –

Scrum Master – In a scrum team, a leader or coach is present as the name of scrum master. A scrum master is responsible for serving and protecting the scrum team to improve their performance. He is present for making a well-organized and influential team where all members focus on implementing agile, scrum principles, and applications.

Product Owner – The product owner is the stakeholder of the project. He involves representing the product requirement first. He has the vision to form and convey the detailed vision to the team.

Scrum Team – Scrum team includes collective individuals who accomplishes a specific task. The team works promptly, and they are responsible to deliver the requested product on time.

What is the velocity metric in agile?

Velocity is an important metric in Agile that you can use for calculating with adding whole effort estimation regarding user stories that are completed in an iteration. It can track by what value each sprint can complete and how much time it will take to complete the project.

What is the product roadmap?

A holistic view of a product feature is the product roadmap. You use it for creating the product vision.

What are the benefits of managing consistent iteration length throughout the project?

Here are some benefits:

• It helps the team to track the progress.    
• It delivers a consistent means to measure team velocity.
• It establishes a consistent pattern to deliver.

What are the basic differences between RUP and scrum?

What is the difference between the agile testing approach and other testing approaches?

In the case of agile testing, the whole code divides into smaller parts. At a particular time, you must test each branch of code. Each branch has continuous communication for testing these parts simultaneously. Hence, the agile process is flexible and focused.

What is the scrum poker technique?

Scrum poker technique or planning poker, is a card-based estimation technique, used as a general agreement. Here are few features:

• The client will read the user story first. Ten estimators select features on the basis of understanding.
• Each estimator has different planning card numbers. These card numbers are the story points.
• This process will repeat until a general agreement is reached.

Mention about some agile certifications.

Agile and Scrum certifications are very important nowadays each software developing company is expecting the candidates to have one of them or more. Organizations generally prefer:

• PSM (Professional Scrum Master)
• CSM (Certified Scrum Master)
• ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner)
• ASM (Agile Scrum Master)

What is the importance of a sprint planning meeting?

In the sprint planning meeting, the whole scrum team with the product owner and scrum master are present to discuss the essential abilities of the team and also the items present in the product backlog.

When will we select the agile model?

In the case of lean software development, or feature driven development, or crystal methodology, or dynamic development we need to use the agile model.

Who is involved in re-prioritizing a timebox plan?

The complete team, product owner, and developers have been involved in re-prioritizing a timebox plan.

What are the other benefits of using agile methodology in another testing except software testing and development testing?

We can use agile methodology for testing biophysics, biochemistry, biomedical, and these aspects having not enough data and projects are required to be completed in a small team.

When not to use Agile?

Before using Agile methodology, you must ask the following questions:

1. Is functionality split-able
2. Are requirements flexible
3. Is customer available
4. Is the team skilled enough
5. Is it time-constrained

What are the most critical agile Matrices?

The following are the critical Agile Matrices

• Velocity: To have a clear about your progress, capacity, and much more keeping track of the velocity is essential. It can be measured by adding all the estimates of the stories that are approved. 
• Work category allocation: the work category allocation will provide a clear idea about where you are investing your time and also about the priority of the work. 
• Defect removal awareness: active members can produce quality products. 
• The cumulative flow diagram: It is the uniform workflow checked in which the x-axis represents time, and the y-axis stands for the number of efforts. 
• The sprint burndown matric: Helps in keeping track of the completion of the work with the sprint.
• Business value delivered: this is an entity that is concerned with the work efficiency of the team. It is used to measure, and 100 points are associated with every project. 
• Time coverage: The time period is measured with the help of the ratio of the number of lines of code known as the test suite by the number of relative lines of codes.
• Defect resolution time: This is concerned with the process where the team members detect and fix bugs. Fixing a bug involves several processes. 
• clearing the picture of the virus
• Schedule a fix
• Fixation of a defect is done. 
• Report of resolution is handed.

What is epic and task?

Epic – It is a software feature that users define. It is itemized in the product backlog. Epic divides into smaller parts known as stories.

Task – Further, you can divide user stories into small parts, that is tasks.

What do you mean by Application Binary Interface (ABI)?

ABI is an interface that you use to compile application programs or the low-level interface that exists between an application and the operating system. Hence, in different system platforms, ABI is a specific requirement that you use for portability of application in binary form.

What is the product burndown chart?

It is the description in the form of a graph that shows the implemented product backlog is called a burndown chart.

What is a sprint burndown chart?

A graph is the representation of the no. of the implemented sprints and non-implemented sprints in the scrum cycle.

What is the Release burndown chart?

The graph is set to be a Release burndown chart when it is used to depict the pending release.

What is a defect burn-down chart?

No. of defects identified and removed is represented by the defect burndown chart

What do you understand about the build breaker?

Several times, a developer accidentally commits a bug into the program. This bug may be responsible for stopping the compilation or execution process by generating the error. This situation occurs due to the failure in the time of the normal execution of testing. Generally, known as a broken build. Now, testers become build breakers and play a vital role to rectify the bug.

Explain the term ‘increment’?

When the team finishes the sprint, hopefully, they have completed everything they forecasted. The sum of all the product backlog items which were completed in a sprint is called increments. This new increment also has the value of increment of the previous sprints.

What is Sashimi?

Sashimi is a Japanese word that means a pierced body. Basically, it is a Japanese dish that consists of fresh meat or fish, sliced into thin pieces. Each piece is similar in taste when compared with the other pieces.

Sashimi in scrum methodology means every phase of the software development cycle in a sprint which includes requirement analysis, planning & design, development, testing, documentation is complete or not and the product is ready to be displayed, etc.

What are impediments?

Any hindrance which prevents the smooth flow of work or due to which the team is not able to perform its task in a better way is what we call ‘impediments’.

What is a Sprint Retrospective meeting?

This is mostly the last part of the sprint or may be done after the sprint review meeting. Scrum master and the whole team participate in it. They discuss ‘ what was good during the sprint’,’ what was bad’,’ what needs to be improved’. It generally lasts for 2-3 hrs.

Tell me something about Kanban?

Kanban is a tool that helps the team to overlook the work ie., its progress. Progress, as well as the status of your current development story, is perfectly described using kanban and more accurately it is done by the ‘Kanban board’.

Kanban board allows you to write the whole scenario of your project at a single place so that you can get a perfect picture of the bottleneck, a task done, workflow progress or basically the complete status of your project.

In your opinion, what skills should an agile tester have?

An agile tester carries out software testing using different agile principles for software development. I think it is important to have an in-depth understanding of agile principles and concepts. Since agile testing requires collaboration and interaction with team members and clients, it can be helpful to have excellent communication skills. You may also need comprehension skills to understand customer requirements and know how to prioritise work tasks to fulfil these. Additionally, agile testers have to understand how changing demands can affect the project.

What are the benefits of pair programming?

Pair programming is the teamwork of two programmers, where one does the coding work and the other reviews it to ensure it is correct and free of errors. There are many benefits to pair programming. The principal one is that it improves the code quality and reduces the chances of making programming mistakes. It also enables both programmers to learn from one another and become better programmers.

Difference between extreme programming and scrum?

Scrum teams usually have to work in iterations which are known as sprints which generally last up to two weeks to one month long while XP team works in the iteration that lasts for one or two weeks.

XP teams are more flexible as they can change their iterations while Scrum teams do not allow any change in their iterations.

The product owner prioritizes the product backlog, but the team decides the sequence in which they will develop the backlog items in scrum methodology. Whereas XP team works in strict priority order, features developed are prioritized by the customers.

What is the velocity of a sprint and how is it measured?

Velocity is one of the planning tools used to estimate the speed of the work and time of completion of the project. The calculation of velocity is done by reviewing the work team has successfully completed during earlier sprints; for example, if the team completed 5 stories during a two-week sprint and each story was worth 3 story points, then the team’s velocity is 15 story points per sprint.

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