Right Answer: Cross-functional teams in Agile are important because they bring together all the necessary skills to complete work without dependencies on other teams. This leads to faster delivery, better problem-solving, and increased innovation. To foster collaboration, encourage open communication, shared understanding of goals, mutual respect, and a focus on collective ownership.
Right Answer: A sprint backlog is a detailed plan of work for a specific sprint, derived from the product backlog. It's created during sprint planning by the development team, who select items from the product backlog they commit to complete, then break down those items into tasks and estimate the effort required for each.
Right Answer: To facilitate effective sprint retrospectives, I would:
1. **Set the Stage:** Create a safe and open environment where the team feels comfortable sharing.
2. **Gather Data:** Collect information about what went well, what didn't, and any challenges faced during the sprint.
3. **Generate Insights:** Facilitate a discussion to identify root causes and patterns.
4. **Decide on Actions:** Collaborate to define specific, actionable, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) improvements.
5. **Close the Retrospective:** Summarize action items and assign owners.
6. **Follow Up:** Track progress on action items in subsequent sprints to ensure continuous improvement.
Right Answer: * **Clear Sprint Goals:** Define specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for each iteration.
* **Daily Stand-ups:** Facilitate short, focused daily meetings to identify roadblocks and coordinate efforts.
* **Sprint Backlog Management:** Keep the sprint backlog refined, prioritized, and realistic based on team capacity.
* **Timeboxing:** Adhere to time limits for meetings and tasks to prevent scope creep and maintain momentum.
* **Focus on Value:** Prioritize tasks that deliver the most business value within the iteration.
* **Remove Impediments:** Proactively identify and resolve obstacles that hinder the team's progress.
* **Limit Work in Progress (WIP):** Encourage the team to focus on completing tasks before starting new ones.
* **Continuous Feedback:** Regularly review progress, gather feedback, and adapt plans as needed.
* **Defined "Definition of Done":** Ensure a clear understanding of what it means for a task to be considered complete.
* **Team Collaboration & Communication:** Foster open and effective communication and collaboration within the team.
Right Answer: "In one project, we underestimated the complexity of integrating a new third-party API. This caused us to miss our sprint goal. To address this, we immediately re-estimated the remaining work, broke down the integration into smaller, more manageable tasks, and increased communication with the API vendor. We also temporarily shifted team focus to prioritize the integration, delaying a lower-priority feature for the next sprint. Finally, in the sprint retrospective, we implemented a better vetting process for third-party integrations to avoid similar issues in the future."
Right Answer: HTTP methods are standardized request types used in APIs to perform actions on resources. The main methods are:
1. **GET**: Retrieve data from a server.
2. **POST**: Send data to a server to create a new resource.
3. **PUT**: Update an existing resource on the server.
4. **DELETE**: Remove a resource from the server.
5. **PATCH**: Apply partial modifications to a resource.
These methods define the action to be performed on the specified resource in the API.
1. **Statelessness**: Each API call must contain all the information needed to understand and process the request, with no stored context on the server.
2. **Client-Server Architecture**: The client and server are separate, allowing for independent development and scalability.
3. **Uniform Interface**: A consistent way to interact with resources, typically using standard HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE).
4. **Resource-Based**: APIs should expose resources (data entities) through URIs, and clients interact with these resources.
5. **Representation**: Resources can be represented in various formats (like JSON or XML), and clients can request the format they prefer.
6. **Cacheability**: Responses should indicate whether they can be cached to improve performance and reduce server load.
These principles guide the design of APIs to be scalable, efficient, and easy to use.
Right Answer: Webhooks are user-defined HTTP callbacks that are triggered by specific events in a web application, allowing real-time data transfer. They differ from APIs in that APIs require a request to be made to receive data, while webhooks automatically send data when an event occurs without needing a request.
Right Answer: OAuth is an open standard for access delegation commonly used for token-based authentication and authorization. It allows third-party applications to access a user's resources without sharing their credentials.
In API authentication, OAuth works by having the user authorize the application to access their data. The process involves:
1. The user is redirected to an authorization server to log in and grant permission.
2. The authorization server issues an access token to the application.
3. The application uses this access token to make API requests on behalf of the user.
4. The API validates the token and grants access to the requested resources.
Right Answer: API testing is the process of verifying that an application programming interface (API) functions as expected, ensuring it meets the requirements for functionality, reliability, performance, and security. Tools that can be used for API testing include Postman, SoapUI, JMeter, RestAssured, and Swagger.
