It’s OK to ask questions about a requirement or plan. As an Agile Coach and Scrum Master so much time can be spent trying to get people to ask questions related to a requirement. Finally asking questions is OK and confirmed in a Google practice interview video. 🙂
See the recap point 21:06 minute mark.
Ask for a clarification of the problem, if you don’t fully understand please feel free to ask for clarification.
I was watching some YouTube videos and I saw a clip “How to: Work at Google — Example Coding/Engineering Interview” The technical part of the interview did not interest me as a coach, but the the interaction was spot on!
Published by Life at Google on Nov 7, 2016
The video can seem to be quite long, but an agile coach I love the iterative process or asking questions and sharing solutions. Then they come up with faster and faster solutions.
This is especially a true skill needed for successful Sprint planning session or refinement sessions. Developers, Testers, Business Analysis have to ask questions to get a good idea of how much work is needed and just to get a good idea of what the Product Owner or Business is looking for.
I love the question by the interviewer at minute 19:15
“Would you do anything different if there were 10 million integers in this collection”
Teams in traditional management approach have been grilled over the years to just accept what the manager, Product Owner or Business gives them. In some places it is even frowned upon to ask a questions. Some people are fearful to ask because they think people will laugh at them for even asking something that should be obvious. Hey now you can say even Google, one of the richest companies in teh world, wants you to ask questions for clarification or they will no hire you. So there must be something to asking clarifications? It is ok to ask and confirm everyone is on the same page I highly recommend Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches share the recap part of the interview (it is only 4 minutes) with your teams in preparation for backlog refinement and / or sprint planning sessions. I love finding these little nuggets from the people that practice the tech skills.
This is also a great video to share with new hires at your company and with the leaders and mentors that are charged with forming good developers, testers, business analysis and people in general.
There is also a good testing point in the interview and edge cases. Really good testers ask about edge cases. So many time have I seen requirements change because a tester brought up an edge case and the business said “Oh Yeah, we need to worry about that also”. Ask those questions up front and early.
Cheers and Happy Scrumming,
Greg
