Top 10 Agile Coach Interview Questions

[Updated on Aug 16, 2019]

The following (revised) 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):

1. What is the difference between a Scrum Master and an Agile Coach?
2. 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?
3. What factors would you consider while deciding the sprint length for a team?
4. How should a team handle scope changes during sprint? If you have experienced such a situation in a previous project, what did you try? What worked for you?
5. What is the benefit of estimating work in story points rather than hours/days? What is the relationship between a story point and time (hours/days)?
6. Management wants to evaluate individual performance on an ongoing basis so it helps them during annual review process. They are thinking about tracking story points completed by each developer in a Sprint. What are your thoughts?
7. A development team is transitioning to Scrum. Who would be your pick for the Scrum Master position - the manager, the senior most developer (or architect), senior tester or someone else?
8. 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?
9. For a distributed team spread across two locations - say India and US east coast - what key practices would you recommend them to adopt?
10. 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 completed 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, there is nothing like it.

By the way, bear in mind there may be some questions to trap you by pushing in the wrong direction (like #5).

Thanks for taking time to read this post. Please feel free to share some good questions that you have come across during an Agile Coach interview.

Cheers, and good luck!