Interview questions in Agile & Scrum, page 8
Shift a Sprint Review from a Demo to a Working Session
Tests your understanding of Sprint Review's purpose: inspection and adaptation. A great answer shows how an engineer can partner with the PO to frame the session around goals, solicit feedback on the Increment, and collaboratively update the Product Backlog.
How should the team address poor internal quality when stakeholders are happy?
Tests whether you protect transparency when stakeholders are happy but quality is poor. Answer: At Review, expose the increment's real state—low transparency causes risky decisions; at Retro, inspect why quality degraded and adapt the process.
How to Handle Poor Quality in a 'Successful' Sprint?
This tests your commitment to transparency and the Definition of Done. A great answer involves being honest about technical debt in the Sprint Review, then strengthening the DoD in the Retrospective. A red flag is hiding the problem from stakeholders.
How to Handle Poor Quality with Happy Stakeholders?
This tests your commitment to Scrum's Transparency pillar. A great answer involves being honest about unsustainable quality in the Sprint Review, proposing a plan (e.g., 20% capacity for tech debt), then using the Retrospective to fix the root cause.
Describe the Red-Green-Refactor cycle in TDD. What is each step's purpose?
This checks if you understand TDD as a design discipline, not just testing. A strong answer maps Red to a failing test defining the interface, Green to minimal passing code, and Refactor to cleaning both codebases without changing behavior.
Describe the Red-Green-Refactor cycle in Test-Driven Development
This tests your grasp of TDD's core loop and its design benefits. Outline the cycle: Red (failing test), Green (minimal code to pass), and Refactor (clean up). Mention creating a test list first. A red flag is ignoring the critical Refactor step.
Describe the TDD Red-Green-Refactor cycle
This tests your grasp of TDD's core loop and its design implications. A good answer defines Red (failing test), Green (minimal code to pass), and Refactor (improve structure).
Explain the Test Pyramid and how it guides testing strategy
Favor fast unit tests, a middle service layer, and few UI tests as second defense.
Explain the Test Pyramid and how it guides your strategy.
Tests your grasp of balanced automated testing. Define the pyramid's layers (Unit, Service, UI), explain trade-offs like speed and cost, then apply it to a new service. A red flag is describing the layers without explaining the 'why' behind the shape.
Explain the Test Pyramid and its strategic use
Tests your grasp of balanced testing trade-offs. A good answer defines the Unit, Service, and UI layers, explains the cost/speed rationale, and applies it to a feature strategy. A red flag is describing the pyramid but not its strategic 'why'.
How do you balance emergent design with long-term architectural vision?
Tests reconciling emergent design with intentional architecture. Strong answers cite the architectural runway: just-enough infrastructure ahead via enablers, extended by teams incrementally. Red flag: claiming architecture is fully upfront or purely organic.
Balancing Emergent Design with Long-Term Architectural Vision
This tests your ability to balance agile practice with large-scale system needs. Explain how an "Architectural Runway," built with "Enablers," reconciles emergent design with intentional architecture for near-term features.
Balancing Emergent Design with Long-Term Architectural Vision
This tests your grasp of scaling Agile. A strong answer defines emergent design and intentional architecture, explaining how an 'Architectural Runway' provides the technical foundation to balance them. A red flag is treating this as an 'either/or' choice.
Describe essential CI/CD stages for a containerized app and critical quality gates
This tests your ability to design a commit-to-prod pipeline with quality controls. A strong answer covers: build and unit tests, vulnerability scanning, staging deployment with integration tests, and production rollout with rollback.
Describe a CI/CD pipeline for a containerized web app
This tests your grasp of automated quality control in software delivery. A strong answer details the CI, build, staging, and production stages, emphasizing quality gates like security scans and E2E tests.
Describe the stages of a CI/CD pipeline for a containerized app
This tests your practical knowledge of automated software delivery and risk management. A strong answer outlines CI, build, test, and deploy stages, including container-specific steps like image scanning and quality gates like automated testing and…
How would you introduce Test-Driven Development to a test-after team?
Tests change management and influence without authority. A strong answer maps TDD to team pain points, pilots it on one story type with measurable outcomes like defect rate. Red flag: mandating TDD team-wide immediately or dismissing existing tests.
How would you introduce TDD to a team?
Tests your ability to drive change pragmatically. A great answer outlines a gradual adoption: start with a pilot, gather data on bug rates and velocity, and scale based on demonstrated value. A red flag is demanding immediate, universal adoption.
How would you introduce TDD to a team?
This tests your ability to influence a team and implement change pragmatically. A great answer outlines a gradual adoption: understand context, advocate with data, pilot on a new feature, then scale. A red flag is demanding a sudden, mandatory switch.
What is the Strangler Fig pattern and its use in legacy modernization?
Tests incremental modernization over big-bang rewrites. A strong answer covers the botanical metaphor, building new components alongside legacy, routing traffic, extracting seams, and four activities. Red flag: a long rewrite delivering no value until launch.
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