The ScrumMaster Diaries: #3 – Becoming a CSM
Dear Diary,
I completed day 1 of my 2-day Certified ScrumMaster course today and I’m feeling a little bit overwhelmed. I didn’t have any idea there was a prerequisite of reading a particular book. Luckily not a lot of other people knew about that either so I didn’t look too stupid. Nothing we covered today was particularly difficult, it was just new to me. A whole lot of it seemed like common sense, but as was pointed out, common sense isn’t so common, especially in software development!
I thought it was interesting to cover the history of agile and scrum and then to compare/contrast different methodologies. I wish we hadn’t spent an hour on it, but it was interesting. I just don’t know how it will help solve the problem. Maybe if I was still in the mode of “selling agile” to the company it would have helped.
On the other hand the parts about how the Scrum Master role differs from a traditional project manager role was VERY useful. Changing from command and control to serving, leading and facilitating will be challenging for some people. It won’t be hard for me since I never had any control anyway <ha>!
I also liked the estimating part a lot. Again, it makes sense, but it is so different from what we normally do that I wonder how it will work. I’m not so sure management will approve of playing poker, even if it is Planning Poker!
The last thing we did was a Scrum simulation. That was a ton of fun, but I wish it did more to advance my learning. I guess I got to see Scrum in action, but on such a small scale I’m not sure I learned as much as I would have liked.
Well, on to bed now. Another full day of CSM training tomorrow!
– Nick
Dear Diary,
I am almost a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) although I’m not sure why. It seems too easy to sit in a class for 2 days then take a test you can’t fail. Oh well, 60,000+ CSMs can’t be wrong. It must be useful.
Today we dug into the Scrum process including the meetings, artifacts and roles a bit more. We also discussed scaling Scrum and how to start up new Scrum implementations. I learned quite a bit – I think. It still seems like too much common sense, but I have to admit I probably wouldn’t have thought of most of it on my own.
I am glad that we covered all of the Scrum process in detail. I now have a much better idea what each role is supposed to do. They don’t map so directly to traditional roles. I’ll need to keep that in mind when I talk to the group as a whole. It will also be interesting to see how QA reacts when I tell them about estimating as a whole team and things get completed EVERY sprint which means testing more than just at the end of a project!
Tomorrow I meet with the rest of the team to fill them in. It should be an interesting meeting!
– Nick
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