Agile & Scrum Interview Questions and Answers

Common anti-patterns usually dress up traditional management as agile.

Zombie Scrum: the ceremonies happen but there is no real self management or working software. The Daily Scrum becomes a status report to the Scrum Master or manager. Story points get treated as a productivity metric and compared between teams. A Product Owner acts as a proxy for a committee with no real authority over priorities. The Sprint Review becomes a demo with no stakeholder feedback, or the retrospective produces actions that are never followed up. No refinement until mid sprint leads to unclear stories and spillover.

I address these by naming the behaviour, connecting it to the underlying purpose it defeats, and coaching rather than blaming. I use data such as cycle time, carry over and defect rates, and I ask the team what these patterns cost them. Improvement sticks when the team owns it.

Scaling Scrum is a problem of coordination, not of adding more Scrum. The first question is whether scaling is needed, because more layers often slow delivery.

I keep teams small, autonomous and aligned to a product or value stream, with clear ownership so they can release independently where possible. I avoid component teams that hand work across boundaries.

For coordination I use a shared Product Goal and a light synchronisation cadence, a Scrum of Scrums or similar forum focused on dependencies, risks and integration, not status reporting. I make dependencies visible on a shared board and design interfaces early.

I invest in engineering practices: continuous integration, automated testing and a definition of done that includes integration, because scaling without technical excellence fails.

Frameworks such as LeSS, SAFe or Nexus can provide structure, but the principles matter more than the brand. I scale gradually and measure flow.