Whether you’re pushing your organization in an Agile direction and needing some outside leadership, looking to replace a long-time employee, or hoping to make some promotions within, determining who will make a good scrum master is a difficult and important task.
It’s impossible to give specific advice because who will perform is down to your corporate culture as much as anything else, but here are five questions that will help determine if your interviewee is the sort of person you want leading your agile teams.
1. Has anything changed the way you approach Agile development?
This question gives you information about two important aspects of your candidate. First, it shows whether they take the initiative regarding their own professional development, which the vast majority of people find beneficial in their careers.
Second, it gives you a sense of whether the individual can bring experience from their broader life to bear in the business world or if they are stuck in the training course material.
2. What traits would you prioritise if you were hiring for an Agile scrum?
A confident answer here can give you a lot of information about the individual’s experience. A scrum master who cannot identify the sort of people who are effective is not a good sign.
This also gives you a sense of whether the candidate will fit in with your current environment. Are the individuals they describe as being ideal the sort of people you have working for you?
3. When have you had to compromise to succeed in Agile development?
Flexibility is the name of the game when it comes to Agile development, so compromise will be a fact of life. You will want an individual who is not afraid to make reasonable compromises to move development forward.
4. When have you removed a barrier to development success?
Most Scrum Master Training Dublin and elsewhere, such as https://www.althris.com/courses/scrum-master/, will focus on problem solving and removing impediments, as that really is the role.
If an individual does not have a healthy number of anecdotes here, they probably don’t have the experience you want.
5. How does Agile development contribute to creating quality software?
A scrum master needs to enable their team, so they need to have a strong understanding of how agile works, in practice, to create a quality end product.