Agile Process

 

There are five types of Scrum meetings held in regular intervals:

Ø  Sprint Planning

Ø  Daily Standup

Ø  Sprint Review

Ø  Sprint Retrospective

Ø  Product Backlog Refinement

Sprint Planning

If a sprint is the working process of Agile, Sprint Planning is the beginning of that process.

This agile ceremony is held by the Development team, Scrum Master, and Product Owner. It is held with the purpose of setting up prioritized work list and aligning the entire team for success throughout the sprint. During the meeting the Product Owner explains the user stories and all of the use cases to everyone. The team has the opportunity to ask questions about them and get rid of any confusion and get clarifications. The Product Owner discusses a prioritized backlog with the development team, and the whole group collectively comes up with the amount of effort involved. The team then decides how much of the work from the backlog can be completed in this iteration. Once effort estimation is done, user stories are assigned to individual team members and work is started. This Scrum meeting should last two hours for every week of the sprint, so a two week sprint would call for a four hour max Scrum meeting.

Daily Standup

An agile ceremony held for the Development Team facilitated by the Scrum Master. The Product Owner and the stakeholders can participate in this meeting to answer the questions raised by the development team. This meeting takes place each day preferably at the same place, and typically held in the morning. The purpose of the Stand-up is to keep everyone on the same page.

·         What did I do yesterday?

·         What will I do today?

·         Are there any impediments to continue working?

Another benefit of the daily standup is transparency.

Sprint Review/Demo

An agile meeting at the end of the sprint, held by Development Team, Scrum Master and Product Owner, where the stakeholders may be invited as well. The purpose is to demo functionality and discuss with shareholders and others what was accomplished during the sprint. The format of the meetings can be casual or formal depending on the team’s preferences. The Scrum Master needs to plan this session well beforehand to make sure participation of stakeholders who can give necessary feedback on sprint demo.

After showing the work progress, the team can expect to receive feedback from the stakeholders. The feedback may vary story to story, but generally we’re hoping for a conversation to make the new functionality better. The PO and stakeholders might provide feedback on changing a feature after seeing and disapproving of the original concept. Team members might inquire about a piece of work and potentially offer more efficient alternatives.

Sprint Retrospective

An agile ceremony held after Sprint Review meeting. Participants are Scrum Master, Product Owner and Development Team. The aim of the meeting is to find out what worked well and what didn’t, in the last iteration. The team tries to find out any issue that is affecting the progress.

Product Backlog Refinement

This ceremony lasts one to two hours, depending on the Scrum team, and occurs between sprints. It gives Scrum teams a chance to:

·         Evaluate a story for clarity, size and feasibility

·         Learn what’s coming up in the next sprint

·         Express concerns early in the process

·         Make sprint planning move quicker

A Product Owner has an idea of what they expect a piece of functionality to look like at the end of each sprint. The refinement meeting exists for having a technical discussion about a user story, and ensuring the Scrum team understands the requirements and that what’s being asked is deliverable within a sprint.

 1) Define the roles in Scrum?

Answer:

There are mainly three roles that a Scrum team have:

1. Project Owner has the responsibility of managing the product backlog. Works with end-users and customers and provides proper requirements to the team to build the proper product.
2. Scrum Master works with the scrum team to make sure each sprint gets completed on time. Scrum master ensures proper workflow for the team.
3. Scrum Team: Each member of the team should be self-organized, dedicated and responsible for the high quality of the work.

2) What is Product Backlog & Sprint Backlog?

Answer: The Product backlog is maintained by the project owner which contains every feature and requirement of the product.

Sprint backlog can be treated as the subset of product backlog which contains features and requirements related to that particular sprint only.

3) Explain Velocity in Agile.

Answer: Velocity is a metric that is calculated by the addition of all efforts estimates associated with user stories completed in an iteration. It predicts how much work Agile can complete in a sprint and how much time will it require to complete a project.

4) Explain the difference between a traditional Waterfall model and Agile testing?

Answer: Agile testing is done parallel to the development activity whereas a traditional waterfall model testing is done at the end of the development.

As done in parallel, agile testing is done on small features whereas, in a waterfall model, testing is performed on the whole application.

5) Explain Pair Programming and its benefits?

Answer: Pair programming is a technique in which two programmer works as a team in which one programmer writes code and other one reviews that code. They both can switch their roles.

Benefits:

• Improved code quality: As the second partner reviews the code simultaneously, it reduces the chances of mistake.
• Knowledge transfer is easy: One experienced partner can teach another partner about the techniques and codes.

6) How do you deal when requirements change frequently?

Answer: This question is to test the analytical capability of the candidate.

The answer can be: Work with PO to understand the exact requirement to update test cases. Also, understand the risk of changing the requirement. Apart from this, one should be able to write a generic test plan and test cases. Don’t go for the automation until requirements are finalized.

7) What is the difference between Epic, User stories & Tasks?

Answer:

User Stories: It defines the actual business requirement. Generally created by the business owner.
Task: To accomplish the business requirements development team create tasks.
Epic: A group of related user stories is called an Epic.

8) What is a Taskboard in Agile?

Answer: Taskboard is a dashboard that shows the progress of the project.

It contains:

• User Story: It has the actual business requirement.
• To Do: Tasks that can be worked on.
• In Progress: Tasks in progress.
• To Verify: Tasks pending for verification or testing
• Done: Completed tasks.

9) What is Test Driven Development (TDD)?

Answer: It is a Test-first development technique in which we add a test first before we write the complete production code. Next, we run the test and based on the result refactor the code to fulfill the test requirement.

10) What is the Zero sprint in Agile?

Answer: It can be defined as a pre-preparation step to the first sprint. Activities like setting development environment, preparing backlog, etc need to be done before starting the first sprint and can be treated as Sprint zero.

11) What is Spike?

Answer: There may be some technical issues or design problem in the project which needs to be resolved first. To provide the solution to this problem “Spikes” are created.

Spikes are of two types- Functional and Technical.

12) How the velocity of the sprint is measured?

Answer: If capacity is measured as a percentage of a 40 hours weeks then, completed story points * team capacity

If capacity is measured in man-hours then Completed story points/team capacity