Recruiting People With Agile Potential March 9, 2007
Posted by Jiri Lundak in Agile, Agile Development, Scrum, Scrum Agile.add a comment
We are currently in need of new developers and testers for our teams. As we try to live Scrum as an Agile development process I often ask myself, what kind of criteria we should expect of the candidates, besides the usual developer or tester skills.
Sure you can not see inside the cadidates’ mind. But more and more we try to ask Agile questions during the interview. Often I ask a question, that I hope will show the candidate’s attitude towards Agile practices and values and to see whether he would have the potential to lead other people by giving them a strong example.
One such question was recently: “The build fails. What will you do?”. The usual answer I get is: “I will fix the build.”. Then I add the tweak. “But, if your code did not break the build?”. Often people then revert back to the ‘I am not responsible for THIS!’ attitude, so they say “I wait till the build is fixed by the developer who broke it.”. The better one’s will propose: “I contact the developer that broke the build and we resolve the problem together as soon as possible.”. As I often see people not acting pro-actively, but in the ‘wait and see’ manner, I hope to get more people on board, that act on problems, instead of tending only their own garden.
Another question I recently asked a potential senior developer and team lead was: “Your team seams not to be able to deliver the functionality they commited to at the beginning of the sprint, because of quality problems. Your demo with the customer at the end of the sprint is to be compromised. What do you do?”. One answer to this question was: “I go to the customer and postpone the demo.”. Boing, a warning sign! Further questioning revealed, that this candidate did not even know what a commitment within an iteration was and how it worked.
Another small test I do with candidates is to refactor a piece of bad code with them in a pair programming fashion. I am not so much interested in solving the particular problem at hand, but in the way the person approaches the problem, how she thinks about the code and how she works herself through to understand it. Does she write a unit test first to frame the working code? Does she rename variables and classes to have a better grasp of what the code is doing?
To people previously not exposed to Agile development I first explain our development approach (Scrum) and then try to ask practical a question on consequences this has on the interaction between team members or between developers and the customer (product owner). Their answers usually reveal a good deal about themselves. How they think about the development process, what they would like to happen in a development process, etc. The additional question I then add is: “What would YOU do to improve the process?”. So I try to at least see how their attitude is concerning the development process. How do they want to live their lives as software developers? Do they think about improving something, they see, is going wrong?
What are your questions you come up with to check for job candidates’ compatibility with Agile values? Let me know about it.
