Agilista - according to the urban dictionary (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Agilista) is a practitioner of agile software development who is fanatical about following the Agile Manifesto.
Well, that’s not exactly what I became (yet?), but yesterday I’ve passed successfully the Professional Scrum Master I assessment and I’ve been awarded a PSM I certificate - who knows what’ll happen next :).
Few interesting things I’d like to share:
- Exam questions were not that hard. Maybe 5 of them were really challenging and 10 more required a moment of consideration. The rest was pretty straightforward (if you’re familiar with Scrum), at least for me.
- What makes the exam quite hard is the high acceptance threshold - 85%. I’ve found the time available (80 questions in 60 minutes) sufficient for both answering and review
- About my preparation approach - I didn’t take any classroom training, I’ve just read a lot of articles, few books (you can find their titles listed below) and I’ve done some investigation within the topics that interested me particularly (contractual issues, self-managing teams in practice, acceptance, etc.).
- Some of the questions were taken directly from Scrum Open Assessment, so don’t forget about trying it before the actual PSM I assessment.
- The most challenging questions (IMHO) were related to:
- when Scrum Master facilitation starts to interfere with Development Team’s self-management
- how to efficiently aid the communication between Product Owner and Development Team
- how far can you “bend” the basic rules (for instance: less than 100% involvement of Scrum Master)
- If you check the list of PSM I certified people (I should appear there within 2 weeks), you’ll see that it is 172 pages long. But if you check the PSM II certified people list, you’ll find out that it’s 4 pages only! One of the reason’s may be the assessment price (100 USD vs 500 USD), but I still believe that the difficulty factor may be an important factor here. I’ve already started to feel the pressure the accept the challenge for PSM II :)
The list of Scrum-related books I’ve read prior to the assessment:
- "Agile Project Management with Scrum" Ken Schwaber - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004OR1XHY/ref=docs-os-doi_0
- "Software in 30 Days: …" Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007P6UPLG/ref=docs-os-doi_0
- "The Elements of Scrum" Chris Sims, Hillary Johnson - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004O0U74Q/ref=docs-os-doi_0
- "Succeeding with Agile: …" Mike Cohn - http://www.amazon.com/Succeeding-Agile-Software-Development-ebook/dp/B002TIOYWQ/ref=pd_sim_kstore_3?ie=UTF8&m=A2ZHC53Q5OYSS4
Ah, well, I didn’t write down my score yet. It was 96% (78/81 pts). The interesting thing is that even if there were 80 questions, you can get 81 pts out of them.