Professional Scrum Master II Interview Questions

The Professional Scrum Master II (PSM II) exam is intended for applicants who want to demonstrate their understanding of how to use the Scrum framework to solve advanced, complex challenges in real-world scenarios.

Scrum is a collaborative framework for agile teams. Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland co-created the Scrum framework in the early 1990s to assist businesses dealing with complex development projects. It encourages the team to self-organize and learn through practise while working on the challenge. Scum is a project that uses the framework and provides value to clients on a regular basis. It is the software that the development team uses the most. The popularity of the Scrum framework stems from its policies and experiences. Scrum is a collection of tools, meetings, and roles that help teams structure themselves. It also oversees the work of the team.

Each component of the framework serves a specific purpose and is critical to Scrum’s success and adoption. Scrum’s rules connect events, roles, and objects, governing their relationships and interactions. In the section that follows, we will look at the most frequently asked Professional Scrum Master II Interview questions and answers for Freshers and experienced candidates.

1. What exactly is Scrum?

Scrum is an Agile framework that can aid in team collaboration. Scrum can help teams learn from their mistakes, self-organize while solving problems, reflect on their successes and failures, and make improvements. This Agile Scrum interview question is frequently used as an icebreaker to get the interview started.

2. What are the roles in Scrum?

• Product Owner: The product owner is the person in charge of increasing the ROI by determining product features, prioritizing these features into a list, determining what needs to be focused on the upcoming sprint, and much more. These are re-prioritized and refined on a regular basis.
• Scrum Master: This person assists the team in learning how to use Scrum to maximize business value. The scrum master removes roadblocks, protects the team from distractions, and enables the team to adopt agile practices.
• Scrum Team: This is a group of people who work together to ensure that the requirements of the stakeholders are met.

3. What are the Scrum Team’s responsibilities?

The Scrum Team is a self-organizing group of five to seven people. Their responsibilities are as follows:

• During each sprint, working products must be developed and delivered.
• For the work assigned to team members, ownership and transparency must be ensured.
• To ensure a successful daily scrum meeting, accurate and concise information must be provided.
• They must work together with the team and with themselves.

4. What are the Scrum Process Artifacts?

• Product Backlog: A list of new features, changes to features, bug fixes, infrastructure changes, and other activities to ensure a specific output can be obtained.
• Sprint Backlog: A subset of the product backlog containing tasks prioritised by the team to meet the sprint goal. Teams begin by identifying the tasks that must be completed from the product backlog. These are then incorporated into the sprint backlog.
• Product Increment: This is the sum of all product backlog items completed in a sprint plus the value of previous sprint increments. Even if the product owner does not release it, the output must be usable.

5. What exactly is a Professional Scrum Master? And what exactly does he/she do?

A Scrum Master is someone who promotes and supports the team’s use of Scrum.

• He or she is familiar with Scrum’s theory, practises, rules, and values.
• He or she ensures that the team adheres to the Scrum values, principles, and practises.
• They remove any distractions and impediments to the project’s progress.
• During the sprint, the Scrum Master ensures that the team delivers value.

6. Define Scrum-ban.

Scrum-ban is a hybrid methodology that combines Scrum and Kanban. Scrum-ban can be used to meet the needs of the team, reduce batching of work, and implement a pull-based system. It cleverly combines Scrum’s structure with Kanban’s flexibility and visualization.

7. What exactly are Sprint 0 and Spike?

Sprint 0 refers to the minimal effort required to create a rough skeleton of the product backlog. It also includes suggestions for estimating product release dates. Sprint 0 is required for the following tasks:

• Developing the project skeleton, as well as research spikes
• Maintaining a minimalist design
• Completely developing some stories

8. What exactly is a ‘Scrum of Scrums’?

It is a term used to describe scaled agile technologies that are require to control and collaborate with multiple scrum teams. It works best in situations where teams are collaborating on complex tasks.It is also used to ensure that the require levels of transparency, collaboration, adaptation, and adoption are met, as well as that the products are deployed and delivered.

9. What is Scrum’s Empirical Process Control?

Empiricism is defined as work that is founded on facts, experiences, evidence, observations, and experimentation. It is established and followed in Scrum to ensure that project progress and interpretation are founded on facts of observation. It is based on openness, observation, and adaptation. The team’s mindset, as well as a shift in thought process and culture, are critical to achieving the organization’s required agility.

10. What occurs during a Sprint Retrospective?

The sprint retrospective follows the sprint review. During this meeting, previous mistakes, potential issues, and new approaches to dealing with them are discussed. This information is used in the planning of a new sprint.

11. What exactly is User-Story Mapping?

User storey mapping represents and arranges user stories that aid in the understanding of system functionalities, the system backlog, the planning of releases, and the provision of value to customers. On the horizontal axis, they arrange user stories in order of priority.

12. What are some disadvantages of using Scrum?

• Scrum necessitates the use of experienced individuals.
• Teams must work together and be dedicate to achieving results.
• A scrum master with insufficient experience can lead to the project’s failure. Tasks must be well define, or the project will be riddled with inaccuracies.
• It is better to smaller projects and is difficult to scale to larger, more complex projects.

13. What are the essential abilities of a Professional Scrum Master?

The essetial abilities of a professional Scrum Master are:

• A thorough understanding of Scrum and Agile concepts is require.
• honed organisational abilities
• To be able to coach and teach the team to follow Scrum practises, you must be familiar with the team’s technology.
• Having the ability to handle and resolve conflicts quickly
• Being a servant leader

14. How should discord be handled within the Scrum Team?

• The root cause of the problem must be identify and address
• It is necessary to establish complete ownership.
• Make an effort to mediate the conflict.
• Accentuate focus areas that are complementary to the project.
• Providing complete visibility and performing continuous monitoring.

15. What exactly is a sprint?

The term sprint is use in Scrum to describe a time-boxed iteration. A specific module or feature of the product is create during a sprint. A sprint can last anywhere from a week to two weeks.

16. Explain Velocity.

Velocity is a metric use to calculate how much work a team completes during a sprint. It refers to the number of completed user stories in a sprint.

17. What exactly is a burnup and burndown chart?

A burnup chart is a tool for tracking completed work and representing the total amount of work that needs to be done for a sprint/project. A burndown chart depicts how quickly user stories are completed. It compares total effort to the amount of work for each iteration.

18. What are some of the risks with Scrum? How are they dealt with?

Scrum risks include the following:

• Budget: The risk of budget overruns
• Individuals (team): Team members must have the necessary skill and capability.
• Sprint (duration and deliverables): Extending the duration, expanding the scope of work
• The product (user stories and epics): Having vague user stories and epics
• Knowledge and capability: Possessing the necessary resources

19. Explain MVP.

Minimum viable product (MVP) is a Lean Startup concept that emphasises the importance of learning while developing a product. This allows you to test and understand the concept by exposing yourself to the initial version for target customers and users. To accomplish this, one must first collect all relevant data and then learn from that data. TThis will also provide more insight into what the needs of the customers or users are.

20. What do you understand by MMP?

The MMP (Minimal Marketable Product) refers to the product description, which will have a limited number of features that address the needs of the users. The MMP would also assist the organisation in reducing time to market.

21. How should you handle score creep?

Score creep is an uncontrolled change that is implement without considering the impact on scope, time, cost, and so on. Here’s what you need to do to deal with it:

• Understanding and communicating the vision to the team, as well as ensuring alignment.
• Capturing and reviewing project requirements on a regular basis (against what is delivered) in order to emphasise to the team and the customer the requirements.
• Assuring that any changes introduce go through change control and are implemented on change request approval.
• Avoid using gold plating.

22. What exactly does DoD stand for?

The term “Definition of Done” (DoD) refers to a collection of deliverables that includes written codes, coding comments, unit tests, integration testing, design documents, release notes, and so on. This provides verifiable and demonstrable benefits to project development. DoD is very helpful to scrum when it comes to identifying deliverables to achieve the project’s goal.

23. Explain Agile.

Agile is a project management and software development methodology that enables teams to deliver value to clients more quickly and with fewer challenges. An agile team distributes work in small, consumable chunks rather than in a “big bang” release. Requirements, strategies, and outcomes are all evaluated on a regular basis, providing teams with a natural way to adapt to change.

24. Why are user stories not estimated in terms of man hours?

Estimating in man-hours is one of the most common methods for evaluating teamwork. While man-hours are simple to understand, they have several significant disadvantages:

• Few activities, such as legacy work, are difficult to precisely estimate.
• The time it takes to complete a task is determine by the developer’s level of experience.
• Teams frequently overestimate the difficulties they may face and focus solely on the best-case scenario.

25. In Scrum, what do you mean by a ‘Confidence Vote’? What is the significance of this?

The Confidence Vote is held at the Program Increment Planning session following the risk analysis. It is when all team members gather and raise their voices and vote with their fingers on their level of confidence in completing the PI Targets. The confidence vote can be used only after all of the features and user stories have been appropriately estimated and prioritise. All work done must be transparent to all parties involved, with all dependencies and risks clearly defined.
With a vote of confidence, you can foster an environment in which people feel free to share and express their ideas. It boosts team morale because team members should feel that their opinions are important.

26. Who can participate in the retrospective meeting?

The sprint retrospective is both an opportunity to analyse and change the process, as well as a time to reflect on it. This includes the Scrum Master, the product owner, and all development team members (including everyone who is designing, building, and testing the product).
Other teams, on the other hand, may not want to include the product owner because it will obstruct their discussion. If there is a lack of trust between the product owner and the development team, or a lack of safety that prevents the product owner from speaking candidly, the product owner should refrain from attending until the Scrum Master can assist those involved in creating a safer, more trusting environment. Anyone who is not a member of the immediate scrum team, particularly the managers of team members, should not be in to participate.

27. What are the three Cs of a User Story?

• The three C’s of a User Story are as follows:
• Card: A written account of the storey that is use for planning and estimation.
• Conversation: To learn more about the Card, you must engage in the Conversation. The conversation encourages the agile team to take small steps together to develop a shared understanding of the problem and potential solutions.
• Confirmation: Confirmation is an acceptance criterion that takes the basic requirements and converts them into test criteria so that we can determine when the user storey has been properly provided.

28. What do you know about Scope Creep?

Scope creep describes how the requirements of a project tend to grow over time, such as when a single deliverable product is split into five, or when a product with three essential features requires ten essential features, or when the customer’s needs change midway through a project, necessitating a reassessment of the project requirements. Changes in project requirements from key stakeholders, as well as internal miscommunication and conflicts, are common causes of scope creep.

29. When should a Professional Scrum Master refrain from acting as a facilitator?

Although a Scrum Master is suppose to assist the team in achieving the best results possible, workshop facilitation can be challenging at times. A workshop facilitator must be objective to the topics being discuss and refrain from interjecting facts or opinions into the discussion. Most general product development workshops can be by the Scrum Master if he or she has the necessary expertise. The Scrum Master, on the other hand, should not facilitate a workshop about changing the Scrum process.

30. How can Scope Creep be controll?

The key to managing scope creep is to control it through a change control procedure. This entails the following:

• Firstly, Maintaining project progress and establishing a baseline scope
• Secondly, Using variance analysis to compare actual work performance metrics to baseline scope, i.e., “How different is the current project from the original plan?”
• Thirdly, determining the cause and magnitude of the observed changes
• Choosing whether to take corrective or preventive action in response to change requests
• Manage all change requests and recommended actions using the Perform Integrated Change Control procedure.

We hope these Professional Scrum Master II interview questions and answers has helped you in your preparation. These expert level questions are specially designed to give you a real-life interview situation sceanario. We wish you all the best for your Professional Scrum Master II interview!