Agile

Burn down and burn up charts are two types of charts that scrum team use to track and communicate the progress of their projects. A burndown chart shows how much work is remaining to be done in the project, whereas a burn up shows how much work has been completed, and the total amount of work. 

As the progress is measured independently on scope change, the burn-up chart makes progress perfectly visible.

So, the mechanics are basically the same. The only difference is that instead of tracking how much work is left to be done, it tracks how much work is completed, so the curve is going up, not down.

Contrary to popular belief that Sprint Zero is necessary because there is some groundwork that needs to be done before a Scrum project can start (for example, a team needs to be assembled, hardware to acquire or at least set up, an initial product backlog is to be written), it is used to create a minimal design so that a detailed design can emerge incrementally in an efficient way in future sprints.

A must-know for anyone heading into Agile interview, this is frequently asked in Agile interview questions.  

Potentially shippable act as a reminder that the developed features may not be sufficient enough to be truly shippable. While each organization or team establishes an appropriate Definition of Done for its context, there are certain guidelines that are applicable across most Scrum projects.

• It should be well written and tested to a point that no important bugs remain.
• It does not necessarily have to be cohesive, i.e. it doesn’t mean anyone wants us to actually ship it yet but if someone had wanted it, the team could have shipped it.
• It should be well integrated to the extent that integration should be done continuously throughout the sprint.

The ability for a team to be cross-functional is fundamental to all agile methodologies. A cross-functional team should be balanced on technical skill levels and domain knowledge should be diverse and persistent. The team structure should reflect that of a feature team who can better evaluate the impact of design decisions. A cross-functional team needs to be balanced between being too generalist and being too specialist, and it does not require any specific role.

This is a frequently asked question in Agile methodology interview questions.  

As per Agile Manifesto Principle 6, “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is via face-to-face conversation”. To encourage this rich form of communication, a user story card is intentionally kept as brief as possible and has 3 elements:

• Card: The user story card includes just enough text to identify the story because the card is simply a token that represents the requirement for the planning process.
• Conversation: The details of the story are communicated via a conversation – a verbal exchange of ideas, opinions, and information between the customer and the development team.
• Confirmation: This means that the product increment passes the customer’s acceptance test and meets the agreed upon definition of “done”.

To build a good user story, Bill Wake described six characteristics of a good user story –

• Independent: Ideally, our goal is to be able to reprioritize and develop our user stories in any order. And this can be achieved, though hard, by creating independent user stories that can be selected on merit, rather than dragging into the release because other user stories depend on it.
• Negotiable: The team should be able to discuss user stories with the product owner and make trade-offs based on cost and function. Negotiating user stories leads to an improved understanding of the true requirements, costs, and acceptable compromises.
• Valuable: User stories without clearly understood business benefits will be difficult to prioritize, since backlogs are usually ranked in business value. And if we cannot determine the value of a requirement, then we should question why it is a part of the project.
• Estimable: Estimation is required to prioritize work based on its cost-benefit trade-off.
• Small: Small user stories are easier to estimate and test than large user stories.
• Testable: Having testable user stories is important for tracking progress because agile teams often measure their progress based upon the number of stories that have been successfully accepted.

The best approach for estimating user stories is one that-

• It allows us to change our minds whenever we have new information about a story
• Works for both epics and smaller user stories
• Doesn’t take a lot of time
• Provides useful information about our progress and the work remaining
• Is tolerant of imprecision in the estimates
• It can be used to plan releases

It's no surprise that this one pops up often in Agile Scrum interview questions.  

Agile teams rely on collective problem-solving rather than individual ingenuity because problems are solved more quickly and effectively when diverse viewpoints are brought to bear rather than when team members try to push through their own. 

Although it is the Scrum Master’s role to remove impediments to progress, which refers to eternal roadblocks, when it comes to development issues, in many cases, only the team members have the expertise needed to resolve the issues.

One of the most frequently posed Agile interview questions, be ready for it.  

Agile models are lightweight, barely sufficient models that aim to capture the high-value benefits of modeling without taking too much time to create very detailed or polished models. We want to focus on the product being developed rather than on generating documentation.

The most popular agile models include Scrum, Lean and Kanban, XP, DSDM, and FDD.

A common in SAFe Agile interview questions, don't miss this one.  

Iteration planning begins with a meeting that includes the delivery team, the product owner, and possibly other stakeholders or SMEs as needed.

In the first half of the meeting, the product owner describes the backlog items they’d like to see developed in the sprint, and based on that, the team members select a set of items that they think are achievable.

In the second half of the meeting, the team breaks down the selected backlog items into the smallest unit of work to come up with a list of action items for the iteration.

In summary, we need to accomplish the below steps during the iteration planning process –

• Discuss the user stories in the backlog
• Select the user stories for the iteration
• Define the acceptance criteria and write acceptance test for the stories
• Break down the user stories into tasks
• Estimate the tasks

A very practical question. I have seen this happening in most of the projects where I worked. There are multiple reasons for not completing the user story example-Dependencies, waiting for some inputs, defects found, some unplanned work, team members going on unplanned leaves, not estimated properly, etc.

As a Product Owner we can handle this in the below-mentioned ways:

• Split the user Story.

The User Stories which are not completed can be transferred to the next sprint.

The tasks which are completed for this user story can be closed. We can re-estimate the story again in the next sprint and take this story as a high priority in the next sprint.

• Product Owner may also say that unless all the tasks of a user story are completed we cannot accept it. In this entire, a user story is transferred to the next sprint and re-estimated. (Not completed tasks.)

But the question arises Does the team earns the velocity credit?

If we are deferring the unfinished user story to the next sprint, then do not take the velocity credit for it. Let the user story meets its acceptance criteria and then take complete credit in the next sprint. We already know that we use average velocity, this averages out and avoid the risk of overstating velocity.

But in case of splitting the user story, then take the credit of points burned for the work completed and let the remaining points for the unfinished work in the next sprint. This just boosts the team’s morale as they have been given points for the work completed and the efforts they have put in.

I am a bit reluctant to take this decision. Take your call based on the discussion.

It's no surprise that this one pops up often in Agile interview questions.

SAFe (Scaled Agile framework) helps businesses address the significant challenges of developing and delivering enterprise-class software and systems in the shortest sustainable lead time.

When to use SAFe:

1. When we want to implement an agile approach consistently across larger, multi-team program and portfolios.
2. Project having 5-10 Scrum teams distributed across various geographical locations.
3. When a team wants to work independently.
4. When an organization wants to improve its product development lead time.
5. When you want to implement Agile across an organization and you are not sure of various roles and responsibilities and how they align and coordinate with each other.
6. When multiple teams are running Agile, but regularly facing delays, no collaboration, and failures.
7. Decentralized decision making.

The benefits of SAFe are:

Its principles are shown in the diagram below:

Another agile methodology is Kanban, XP (Extreme Engineering, Lean thinking).

Let us compare the Kanban and Scrum Approach.

Similarities 

•  Both are Lean and Agile 
•  Both use pull scheduling 
•  Both limit WIP 
•  Both use transparency to drive process improvement 
•  Both focus on delivering releasable software early and often
•  Both are based on self-organizing teams 
•  Both require breaking the work into pieces 
•  In both, the release plan is continuously optimized based on empirical data (velocity/lead time)

Scrum Board:

Kanban Board: 

Now the whole workflow is on the same board. In the example above the “Backlog” column is just a general Wishlist, in no particular order. The “Selected” column contains the high priority items, with a Kanban limit of 2.

The “Dev” limit of 3 is shared among the two sub-columns. Why? Let’s say there are 2 items in “Done”: 

That means there can only be 1 item in “Ongoing”. That means there will be excess capacity, developers who could start a new item but aren’t allowed to because of the Kanban limit. That gives them a strong incentive to focus their efforts and helping to get stuff into production, to clear the “Done” column and to maximize the flow. This effect is nice and gradual – the more stuff in “Done”, the less stuff is allowed in “Ongoing” – which helps the team focus on the right things.

Scrum is less prescriptive than XP since it doesn’t prescribe any specific engineering practices. 

XP (Extreme Programming) is pretty prescriptive compared to Scrum. It includes most of Scrum + a bunch of fairly specific engineering practices such as test-driven development and pair programming. 

The five values of XP are communication, simplicity, feedback, courage, and respect.

1. Extreme Programming empowers your developers to confidently respond to changing customer requirements, even late in the life cycle.
2. Extreme Programmers constantly communicate with their customers and fellow programmers. They keep their design simple and clean. 
3. They get feedback by testing their software starting on day one. They deliver the system to the customers as early as possible and implement changes as suggested. 
4. Every small success deepens their respect for the unique contributions of each and every team member. 
5. With this foundation, Extreme Programmers are able to courageously respond to changing requirements and technology.

Lean Thinking:

The principles of Lean thinking are:

Lean says to relentlessly eliminate anything that isn’t adding value and only work on what we absolutely need to be doing at this moment in time. Eliminating waste means eliminating useless meetings, tasks, and documentation.

Lean says to respect that the people doing the work are the ones that best know how to do it. Give them what they need to be effective and then trust them to do it. Software development is about learning, so structure the work to ensure we’re continuously learning. 

Finally, develop in a way that builds quality into our product because there’s no way to continuously deliver fast if we have to keep going back to clean up our messes.

One of the most frequently posed Agile interview questions, be ready for it.

More importantly the Agile practitioner should be the “seller of Agile” wherever he goes. His heart and soul should think only about its principles, manifesto and different ways of implementing it.

1. Engage people in this discussion by various means. Not necessarily in meetings can be in during Lunch time, coffee time etc.
2. Arrange for different types of workshops to train them.
3. Call them for the sprint planning, review, and retrospection.
4. Discuss the velocity, lead time change from idea to product launch and level of customer satisfaction during this process.
5. Arrange for small pilot projects for their domain to give them more insights into this process.
6. Product and engineering teams can demonstrate that scrum mitigates risk (i.e. the prediction of when new features could be made available), thus contributing to other departments’ successes in planning and execution.

Again a very important interview question as interviewer wants to know if you faced this situation earlier, if yes how you overcome it.

This is a very important concern in any team and it needs to be solved very diligently.

Because cherry picking can be done by senior people also.

1. As an Agile Practitioner/Scrum Master/Product owner make sure in sprint planning meeting you have clear, refined and prioritized backlog ready for the team to work.
2. As Scrum given the freedom to any individual to pick up any task…but hold on only on the prioritized stories which are selected by your product owner.
3. Not doing that will lead to a lot of unfinished tasks at the end and your product may not be in a condition to give a demo to the stakeholders.
4. If the team fails in understanding the goal of the sprint, the scrum master should help him on this. Additional training might also help.
5. Let the cherry-picking task be transparent to everyone in the daily scrum (As we use scrum board) and when everyone will see that work in progress are many and not moving towards completed state then you can directly ask the team what the reason could be and what are the possible ways to overcome them. Best way to show your Scrum Master skills.
6. Some people may do cherry picking if they find something interesting task to be picked up or easy task, but SCRUM is all about team goals, not an individual. An individual may automatically succeed if the team succeeds.

For an interview this will be a trap so don’t tell that I will have to tell him to do this and that…No micromanagement. Don’t try to take the driver seat…

There are 4 different levels of SAFe in 4.0 version onwards.

They are shown in the figure below:

• Team Level-:

This level is the same as that of what we know about Scrum, it’s Artifacts, roles and events/ceremonies.

All scrum teams are part of one or the other ART (Agile Release train).

ART is explained in the below diagram. Basically, this is a team of 50-100 people (cross-functional) responsible for defining and deploying the new system, plan, commit and delivers the solution to the customer in a particular time frame.

• Program Level:

At this level product and program manager has the authority to define the Backlog.

At this level, different roles are DevOps, System Architect, RTE, Product Management, System Team, Business owners, Customer, UX Architect.

The main events of this level are:

• ART:

1. This level value of SAFe is delivered by ART. Iteration is for the Team and train is for the program. It delivers a value stream to the organization.
2. SAFe artifact hierarchy is Epics->features->user stories. User Stories then drill down to the team level.
3. Various team (from marketing, development, quality, operations, and deployment) forms 'Release Management Team'. They will approve routine releases of quality solutions to customers
   

• PI planning- 

Duration is about 8-12 weeks. A very huge event where all the cross-functional team members across the globe participate and work towards the common goal. A valuable increment of the system is developed and delivered.

PI deliverables:

• System Demos-At the end of each PI (Every 2 weeks) the full integrated work of all teams is demoed. This is in addition to each team iteration demo. Stakeholders provide the feedback and corrective action needs to be taken if required.
• Inspect and Adapt- This is also held at the end of each PI to demonstrate the solution, get the feedback, solve the problem and identify improvement areas
• Architectural Runway- It is an existing code base, components, technical infrastructure on top where new features are developed without much change in code.
• Release Any Time- This separates the development cadence from the solution release cycle. Trains may release whatever is needed at any time.
• Value Stream Level-This level is optional but required in below cases.
• The organization is big in size

1. Complex solutions
2. The solution requires multiple ART’s
3. System challenges

• Portfolio Level-

Highest level of concern/involvement in SAFe is portfolio Level.

1. It provides basic budgeting and other governance mechanisms.
2. This way it assures that investment in the value streams provides the basic returns for the enterprise.
3. Portfolio Program Management are key stakeholders and they are responsible for delivering the business results.
4. Here the backlog contains the EPICS (Which contains many features.), EPIC owners are responsible for driving this.
5. The main roles involved are Enterprise Architect, PPM (Program Portfolio Management), Epic owners.
6. Events are Strategic business planning and Epic planning.

This is frequently asked in SAFe Agile interview questions.  

Considering 100% capacity for each team member will lead to overtime and Stress in the team environment. So, it is never recommended.

Before the sprint starts, in the sprint planning meeting Scrum Master can prepare one excel sheet containing a column of the name of each team member, any vacations planned, % contribution for the project.

Consider a 2 weeks Sprint, 10 days and 5 people on board, the table may look like this:

Going beyond 0.8 can be risky and can derail teams too.

In this sprint, the total available working hours for the team is 190 hours. The reason for asking the productivity for the sprint is that out of 8 hours per day we need to spend on meetings, some presentations, interviews, and Mails etc. Generally, we consider 6 hours a day of each team in which they work to their full capacity. The why 50% or 60%? The reason could be 

1. A team member might have to work on 2 projects. (Sometimes other team needs the help of this person)
2. A team member has to spend time on technical debt for some other project also.
3. A team member is in training for a few days.
4. A team member is allocated to support maintenance activities also.
5. Ceremonies
6. Unplanned work

After arriving the figure called 190 hours the same can be filled into the Project Management tool.

But the question may arise why hours??? Here we are calculating tasks details which are done in a number of hours. i.e. breaking the user story into tasks.

To the question about team member working on multiple projects. Ideally “Not recommended”. But It depends upon the situation. When doing heavy development, it is better to have a single product. If doing lighter enhancements, multiple products can be supported.

The "rule of thumb" to address that is to work on one product until you have something to deliver, and only at *that* point chooses whether the next deliverable thing will be from this product or the other. Working on 2 different features at the same time delays the delivery of both - even when for the same product. If you already know you want them both finished before you deliver, then working in parallel is not too much of a problem; other factors than early ROI and early feedback from having delivered, take precedence. But this rarely applies when working on 2 different products that are very likely to have independent delivery cycles.

Keywords

Let’s say the following are our arrays: 

[20, 40, 60]
[80, 100, 120]

To merge them, JavaScript provides the Array.concat() method. The return value of this method is a new array with the result of concatenated arrays: 

var res = arr1.concat(arr2); 

Let us now merge the above two arrays: 

<html>
   <head>
      <title>Merge JavaScript Arrays</title>
   </head>
   <body>
      <script>
         var arr1 = [20, 40, 60];
         var arr2 = [80, 100, 120];
         document.write("Array 1 = " + arr1);
         document.write("<br>Array 2 = " + arr2 );
         var res = arr1.concat(arr2);
         document.write("<br>Merged Arrays = " + res );
      </script>
   </body>
</html>

The output displays the merged arrays: 

Array 1 = 20,40,60
Array 2 = 80,100,120
Merged Arrays = 20,40,60,80,100,120

There is no standard/universal checklist to measure an organization’s successful Agile adoption. So, every organization should develop its own set of criteria based on what matters most to them. Some of the examples include:

• Development teams are better able to estimate and predict releases
• Products delivered to customers feature better value proposition
• The operations team has the bandwidth for more value addition
• Enterprise architecture is robust but flexible
• Teams participate and contribute to common corporate initiatives not directly related to their projects
• Business stakeholders actively participate in Agile ceremonies
• Increase in software quality and reduced technical debt
• Reduced lead time to ship validated product, and reduced cycle time for hypothesis validation

This is a regular feature in Agile Scrum interview questions, be ready to tackle it.

While doing Agile is about following sets of practices, it is the Agile attitude which complements the practices and helps the organization reap maximum benefit. So, if a team is just following a defined set of practices without understanding the rationale behind it and not having an Agile mindset, the team will not succeed. So, I shall ask a few questions like Has your team adapted any of the Scrum practices to suit your team’s need? How frequently does your team release value to its customers? Does the team hold each other accountable to sprint and project success and are they empowered? Does the team stride to improve their technical expertise and is time buffered for innovation? How does the team respond if there's a crisis or problem that makes a deadline or planned milestone no longer possible to achieve?

These are just a few quick litmus tests to see if a team is being Agile and if a team is negative on any of the above questions, then they are most definitely not there yet.

Metrics in Agile can have three most important goals:

• To measure how much value is being delivered to customers.
• To measure effectiveness delivery to the business.
• To measure a team’s health

Measuring deliverables:

• Team Velocity shows how many user stories were completed by the team, on an average, in previous sprints. It assists in estimating how much work the team is able to accomplish in future sprints.
• Escaped Defects shows how many bugs were experienced by users in production.
• Sprint burn-down shows the number of hours remaining to complete the stories planned for the current sprint, for each day during the sprint. 

Measuring effectiveness:

• Time to market shows the time a project takes to start providing value to customers.
• ROI shows the total revenue generated from a product vs. the cost of the sprints required to develop it.

Team’s health:

• Member turnover shows how healthy the team environment is.
• Team satisfaction survey shows how satisfied team members are with their work.
• Sprint retrospective gives a qualitative measurement of the team’s health.

Velocity can be a very useful predictor of how much work an Agile team can compete in the future. In general, the impact can be ignored with the idea that history repeats itself and that team members will probably take time off in the future at the same rate they took time off in the past and reduced productivity balances off over a long term.

However some situations demand adjustment for holidays and team member vacations, like in a situation when a project is of short duration, a team member is on leave for more than a normal period, etc. In such cases, velocity is adjusted proportionately to the full team, with an understanding that everyone can do everything. So, Predicted Velocity = Average Velocity × (Planned Working Days ÷ Average Working Days).

But in case if team members are not interchangeable, velocity is adjusted proportionately based on skills.

Agile planning is iterative in nature.

The quality of execution in any project largely depends on choosing the correct methodology. In some cases, Agile will be an ideal option, but not always. A flexible development model should be applied in the following cases:

• The consumer needs to quickly launch the product and commercialize it.
• The client is ready to regularly communicate with the team.
• The team is able to adapt to new challenges and work independently.
• Any changes will be made throughout the project development cycle.

The below matrix also represents where Agile works well.

A staple in Agile interview questions, be prepared to answer this one.  

A Spike is a key tool used by agile teams to investigate and resolve problems as early as possible. It is a short time-boxed exploration of an approach to reduce project risk by learning just enough about the unknown aspect of a user story.

Although spikes can be done at any time during a project, they are generally don’t at the start of a project, before the development effort begins.

There are two types of spikes:

• Architectural spike: The idea is to explore the viability of an approach or a solution in a short time frame.
• Risk-based spike: The idea is to investigate, and possibly reduce, an issue or threat to the project.

The entire Scrum team owns risk management and is responsible for mitigating it together, they should always think about the risks that could threaten the success of the project.

Accepting only fully groomed story for a sprint, making the increment size smaller, are few effective ways to reduce risks early in the project lifecycle. Daily stand-up (What is blocking progress?), sprint review and retrospective are few platforms to identify and discuss risks.

When a team encounters risks, they should maintain them in a way that ensures that the status and priority of each risk is visible and monitored. Risk burn-down chart is one such effective graphical indicator. Depending on the impact a risk causes, some can be accepted, some just monitored, and priority risks added to the backlog for mitigation planning.

While the traditional triangle of constraint kept Scope as fixed and Time & Cost as a variable, the Agile Triangle of Constraints keeps Cost & Time as fixed and Scope as a variable component.

This reversal of the traditional triangle means that the agile team allows the scope to vary within the fixed parameters of cost and time. In other words, we aim to deliver the most value we can by X date within X budget. As knowledge work projects are characterized by experimentation and uncertainty – and the end product can be refined forever, we need to determine acceptable operating boundaries, which usually takes in the form of cost and time constraints. For example, let’s say we are developing training materials for a course on agile. For a project such as this, we could continue adding and tweaking our lesson material and exercises indefinitely. Instead, we need to get to an acceptable performance point, and then have the discipline to stop.

Expect to come across this in Agile testing interview questions.  

Process tailoring refers to adapting our implementation of agile to better fit out project environment.

As a general recommendation, teams that are new to agile should use their methodology “out-of-the-box” for a few projects before attempting to change it. That’s because the problems a new team encounters with a standard technique or practice should be due to their lack of skill or experience using that technique, rather than issues with the technique itself. By discarding or changing the practice before its value is recognized, we risk losing the benefit the practice was originally designed to bring to the project.

In addition, the team should go through the three-step process to increase mastery and address the appropriate time and place for agile process tailoring.

• Shu: Obeying the rules – means “to keep, protect, or maintain”
• Ha: Consciously moving away from the roles – “to detach or break free”
• Ri: Unconsciously finding an individual path – “to go beyond transcend”

Fail fast is a philosophy that suggests if a proof-of-concept effort isn’t successful, we can try a different approach and if none of the approaches are successful, we cut the losses.

The principle behind it is that rather than continuing on a project that would have eventually failed, the remaining funds and resources from the project can now be directed to other projects that are awaiting resources.

Fail Fast principle is also applied at the software bug lifecycle. As we know, the longer it takes for a bug to appear on the surface, the longer it takes to fix and the greater it costs.

Fail-fast makes bugs and failures appear sooner, thus:

• Bugs are earlier to detect, easier to reproduce and faster to fix.
• It’s faster to stabilize software.
• Fewer bugs and defects will go into production, thus leading to higher-quality and more production-ready software.
• The cost of failures and bugs are reduced.

Fail-fast is the principle behind many agile practices like Test Driven Development and Continuous Integration.

A staple in Agile methodology interview questions, be prepared to answer this one.