Agile, Scrum and Delivery
Scrum is a small framework that most organisations adopt partially and then blame. The facilitation and flow skills remain genuinely valuable; the dedicated Scrum Master job is a much narrower market than the certification industry implies, and is increasingly absorbed by EMs and tech leads.
Assumes you know: Having worked on a software team for long enough to have seen a plan fail, Comfort with a spreadsheet and basic arithmetic on dates and counts
Overview
What this area actually covers
Two separate things share one name. The first is Scrum, a deliberately small framework defined in a document of roughly a dozen pages: three accountabilities, five events, three artefacts, and a set of rules about who may decide what. It is short enough to read in twenty minutes and specific enough that most disagreements about "whether we are doing Scrum" could be settled by reading it. The second thing is delivery practice — the facilitation, forecasting, dependency management, flow measurement and stakeholder negotiation that a team needs whether or not it uses Scrum at all. Interviews in this area range across both, and confusing them is the commonest reason a candidate sounds shallow.
A great deal gets wrongly bundled into "Scrum". Story points, velocity, planning poker, burndown charts, a Definition of Ready, backlog grooming as a scheduled meeting, Sprint Zero, hardening sprints, and the three questions people still recite at standup are none of them in the framework. Some are useful conventions, some are actively harmful, but a candidate who presents them as Scrum has revealed that their knowledge came from a course deck rather than the source. Equally, project management is adjacent but distinct: a delivery manager owns a plan, a budget and a set of external dependencies, which Scrum does not describe at all.
The boundary with engineering management matters too. Scrum says nothing about performance reviews, hiring, compensation or careers. Those belong to the manager, and one recurring organisational failure is a Scrum Master who drifts into them without the authority or the accountability that should accompany them.
Where to go next
Now practise it
21 interview questions in Agile, Scrum & Delivery, each with the rubric the interviewer is scoring against.
- Your Product Backlog has grown past four hundred items and refinement takes two hours a week without anything getting clearer. What would you change?
- For three sprints running your team has lost most of a week waiting for a shared test environment another group controls. What do you do about it?
- You have six teams building one product and they keep blocking each other. How do you coordinate the dependencies, and what do you make of frameworks like SAFe?
- Your daily scrum has turned into fifteen people reporting status to you. How do you fix it?