Practice 37 Agile Scrum Master interview questions covering ceremonies, team dynamics, and impediment removal.
Question 15 of 37
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Karrie Day is a certified career coach and strategist with a passion for helping her clients define and reach their professional goals. She offers career advancement services such as brand development, resume writing and critiques, job search strategies,
Sprints that are poorly planned often result in chaos and waste. Interviewers are concerned with operational efficiency and want to determine if Scrum Master candidates understand how to facilitate these important meetings.

Karrie Day is a certified career coach and strategist with a passion for helping her clients define and reach their professional goals. She offers career advancement services such as brand development, resume writing and critiques, job search strategies,
Avoid terms native to other agile or waterfall disciplines when describing sprint planning sessions. While many companies have adopted inclusive language that resonates with their specific teams, the interviewer may become confused or lack confidence in your knowledge if you blend methodologies here.

Karrie Day is a certified career coach and strategist with a passion for helping her clients define and reach their professional goals. She offers career advancement services such as brand development, resume writing and critiques, job search strategies,
Teams use sprint planning meetings to plan for and make their commitment for the current sprint. The Product Owner reviews the top items from the product backlog, and we discuss any necessary changes to the estimation or high-level scope of the highest priority stories. We also discuss any relevant changes in business goals or directions that need to be considered.
We then discuss the availability of everyone during the sprint and determine a resulting velocity projection. This helps us to know how many stories we can take on during the sprint. We discuss the definition of 'done' for the top priority stories. This consists of a story scope negotiation between the development team and the Product Owner. I play the role of facilitator and ensure conflicts are resolved appropriately and that we lean on the Scrum principles to decide what is best. The results of these discussions are documented in the acceptance criteria of each story.
We then break down the tasks that are needed to complete each story we hope to include and create the sprint backlog. Many times, teams also add hours estimates to the tasks to ensure that the projected scope is feasible. The result of this work represents the commitment that the team makes for the sprint. We then conclude the meeting and begin our work.

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Teams use sprint planning to plan for their commitment to the current sprint. The product owner reviews the top item of the product backlog, negotiates with the development and we discuss if there are any changes needed to be made regarding estimations. We also discuss the availability of team members to help us determine our teams' velocity. I play the role of a facilitator and ensure conflicts are resolved. The result of these meetings is documented in the acceptance criteria of each story. The task is now broken into smaller chunks and added to the sprint backlog. The result of the meeting is the commitment of the team toward the sprint.
Marcie's Feedback
Awesome! You've done an excellent job of explaining what a sprint planning session is, what the expected outcomes are, and what role you play in them. To further personalize your answer, consider speaking more specifically about a time when you participated in a sprint planning session and what happened. Great job!
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Written by Karrie Day
37 Questions & Answers • Agile Scrum Master

By Karrie

By Karrie