The following list of top ten Agile Coach interview questions is based on my own experience and the feedback shared by several other Agile coaches during training sessions (mainly ICP-ACC):
- Describe the typical journey of a team towards their goal of being a high performing team? Have you been able to create high performance teams in the past? If yes, tell us 2-3 things that helped you the most in your journey towards creating a high performing team?
- What factors would you consider while deciding the sprint length for a team?
- How should a team handle scope change requests during sprint? If you experienced such a situation in a previous project, what did you try? What worked for you?
- Why should we estimate stories in story points rather than hours/days? How would you translate a story point to hours?
- Management wants to evaluate individual performance on an ongoing basis so it helps them during annual review process. What approach or metrics would you recommend them?
- Management wants to create self-managing teams. How would you measure and track the self-managing culture of a team?
- A team finds retrospective to be a waste of time. No one wants to attend them, and when they do, it usually turns into a blame game. As an agile coach, how would you approach this situation?
- What are some of the ways you have conducted retrospectives in the past? What has usually worked for you while conducting an effective retrospective?
- For a distributed team spread across two locations - say India and US east coast - what key practices would you recommend them to adopt?
- What are some of the approaches to deal with team conflicts? How would you approach a conflict between developers and testers where developers feel testers are raising unnecessary bugs and testers feel developers give them the stories too late in the Sprint?
A QUICK NOTE... A good answer will go deeper than a theoretical 'what' and 'how', and will touch upon a little bit of 'why'. And, if you can top it up with an evidence of success from your own experience, that would be perfect.
PS: There may be some questions to trap you by pushing in the wrong direction (like #5).
Cheers, and good luck for your next interview!
[This article was first posted on LinkedIn. Please find the original post here.]
