MJ's harder than usual Certified Scrum Master (CSM) Experience takes a more comprehensive, in-depth approach to CSM training for people who want to apply the Scrum principles to real world situations and explore how to avoid common mistakes other organizations have made. This harder than usual workshop only accepts participants who are willing to prepare before class.
Michael James is Seattle's Scrum expert, author of the the world's most popular Scrum e-learning series, as well as materials used by other trainers and translated by volunteers into twelve languages. Participants complete the free online preparation work before class because well-prepared groups are able to spend time exploring more advanced topics. The class is 90% activity, with very little lecture and PowerPoint. Unlike most trainers, MJ checks your knowledge during class to ensure you cannot fail the ScrumAlliance's test. MJ's harder than usual class prepares you to explain Scrum to others when implementing it at work, and during job interviews.
Main topics covered primarily by team activities and examples (any lectures would be very short):
- How Agile development differs from traditional project management.
- Three Scrum roles, responsibilities, boundaries, in depth.
- How to write well formed Product Backlog Items such as user stories.
- Techniques for splitting large requirements (e.g. epics) into small specific ones.
- Product Backlog prioritization.
- Effort estimation.
- Maintaining the Sprint Backlog.
- Five Scrum meetings (how to, how not to).
- Sprint execution for self organizing teams.
- Definition of done and the potentially-shippable product increment.
- Environments that encourage or impede team self organization.
- Small group dynamics (the psychology of innovative teams).
- Modern Agile engineering practices including test-driven development (TDD).
- Lean principles derived from the Toyota Production System.
- Product Owner planning and forecasting beyond one Sprint.
- Case studies of Scrum in large organizations.
- Case studies of Scrum for large scale development.
- Case studies of common organizational impediments.
- Case studies of successful and unsuccessful attempts to introduce Scrum/Agile to organizations.
The class contains individual and group knowledge tests that precede the ScrumAlliance's online test.
Better prepared groups are able to spend more time on the advanced topics.
