Teams & Process interview questions

Acceptance criteria are the specific, testable conditions a single user story or backlog item must meet before the Product Owner accepts it as complete.

The Product Owner is usually responsible for them, but they work best when written together with developers and testers, who spot missing cases and check that each criterion can be tested.

Acceptance criteria are specific to one user story and describe its required behavior. The Definition of Done is a single checklist of quality standards that applies to every story the team delivers.

A short numbered list of rules works for simple stories, while Given-When-Then scenarios work well for behavior with several steps or conditions. Either way, each criterion should be clear and testable.

Agile is an approach to software development that delivers working software in small, frequent increments and adjusts plans based on regular feedback.

Agile is a broad set of values and principles for building software iteratively. Scrum is one specific framework that implements those ideas with defined roles, events such as sprints, and artifacts such as the product backlog.

Waterfall runs a project in long sequential phases, so users see working software only near the end. Agile repeats short cycles of planning, building, and reviewing, so the team gets feedback and can change direction early.

No. Agile began in software, but its ideas of short cycles, frequent feedback, and continuous improvement are now used in marketing, design, hardware, and many other fields.

A burndown chart is a graph that shows how much work remains in a sprint or release over time, so a team can see at a glance whether it is on track to finish.

A burndown chart shows remaining work going down toward zero. A burnup chart shows completed work going up toward a separate total-scope line, which makes it easier to see when scope was added.

It means no work was completed during that period. Common causes are blocked items, too much work in progress at once, or tasks that are too large to finish in a day or two.

The bus factor is the smallest number of people who would have to leave a project suddenly before it stalls because nobody left knows its critical parts.

There is no universal number, but every critical area should have a bus factor of at least 2, and ideally 3 or more. For a whole project, the higher the better, as long as knowledge is shared deliberately rather than by accident.

The lottery factor is a friendlier name for the bus factor. It asks how many people could win the lottery and quit before the project stalls, which describes the same risk without the grim image.

Share knowledge on purpose: pair or mob program, have different people review and work on each area, rotate on-call duty, and keep short, up-to-date documentation for critical systems.

A code smell is a surface sign in code that often points to a deeper design problem, even though the code still works.

No. Code with smells can work correctly. A smell indicates that the code may be hard to maintain or extend, which makes future bugs more likely.

Long methods, large classes, duplicated code, long parameter lists, feature envy, shotgun surgery, primitive obsession, magic numbers, dead code and comments that explain confusing code instead of the code being made clearer.

With a matching refactoring, such as extracting a function, introducing a named constant or moving a method, done in small steps with tests to confirm the behavior doesn't change.

A daily standup is a short daily meeting, usually 15 minutes or less, where a team checks progress toward its goal, plans the day, and raises blockers.

The classic questions are what did I do yesterday, what will I do today, and is anything blocking me. They are a common format, not a rule, and the current Scrum Guide lets teams choose any structure that serves the sprint goal.

The Daily Scrum is Scrum's official name for the event, and standup is the everyday name used by many teams, including those that don't use Scrum. The idea is the same: a short daily meeting to coordinate work.

Teams originally stood during the meeting so that nobody got comfortable and the discussion stayed short. Many remote teams keep the name even though everyone is sitting.

The Definition of Done is a shared checklist of quality standards that every piece of work must meet before a team can consider it complete.

Acceptance criteria describe what one specific user story must do, while the Definition of Done is a quality standard that applies to every story. A story is only complete when it satisfies both.

In Scrum, the Scrum team creates it together. If the organization already has a standard, the team follows that standard and may add stricter criteria of its own.

Yes. Teams often review it in retrospectives and make it stricter as their skills and tools improve, for example by adding automated security scans.

An epic is a large body of work in Agile that is too big to finish in one sprint, so the team breaks it down into smaller user stories delivered over time.

A user story is small enough to finish within one sprint, while an epic is too big and must be split into several stories. Both describe value for a user; the difference is size.

There is no fixed rule, but most epics take a few sprints to a few months. If an epic drags on much longer, it is often a sign that it should be split into smaller epics with clearer goals.