Author: Mehdi Hoseini

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Preparation guide for the PSM III exam

PSM III exam is expensive and most challenging, so we have provided a guide for the candidates to prepare, practice and pass it according to our experience.

Professional Scrum Master III

Scrum.org exams and in this case PSM III exam are challenging and expensive. So people want to know how they can pass these exams with more confidence. Therefore, we have decided to prepare a series of preparation guides for the Scrum.org exams.
Each guide contains minimum mandatory actions that should be done for passing the exam in a suitable time. The PSM III exam is an essay-based exam and the most difficult one in the Scrum world. So, don’t take the exam before complete preparation.
In this post, we will introduce the PSM III exam (Professional Scrum Master III) step by step preparation guide as follows:

Main Materials

  1. Read “The Scrum Guide” carefully word by word
  2. “Mastering Professional Scrum” book by Stephanie Ockerman and Simon Reindl
  3. “Fixing Your Scrum” book by Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller
  4. “Scrum A Pocket Guide” book by Gunther Verheyen
  5. “Scrum Insights for Practitioners: The Scrum Guide Companion” book by Hiren Doshi
  6. “Coaching Agile Teams” book by Lyssa Adkins
  7. “The Professional Product Owner: Leveraging Scrum as a Competitive Advantage” book by Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham
  8. ”The Scrum Values” blog post by Gunther Verheyen

Books and Articles

  1. Read “The Nexus Guide” carefully
  2. Read all materials of the Scrum Master Learning Path
  3. “Software in 30 days” book by Ken Schwaber
  4. “The five dysfunctions of a team” book by Patrick Lencioni
  5. “Extreme Ownership” book by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
  6. The Scrum Glossary
  7. ”There’s Value in the Scrum Values” blog post by Gunther Verheyen
  8. ”4 Ways to Coach with the Scrum Values” blog post by Stephanie Ockerman
  9. ”Definition of Done” blog post by Gunther Verheyen
  10. Read the ” Evidence-Based Management (EBM)”

Complementary Materials

  1. Check your knowledge by Professional Scrum Master III (PSM III) practice assessment on theScrumMaster.co.uk website by Simon Kneafsey
  2. It is recommended to participate in a two-day PSM I course
  3. Do all scrum open tests (scrum, product owner, developer, Nexus)
  4. Time management is one of the most important things that you should practice a lot.
  5. Be in your highest energy state when you want to take the exam
  6. Read ScrumSchool.team Scrum Master tips and tricks training manual
  7. The PSM III exam format is a combination of multiple-choice and essay questions and most of them are essay questions, so read Scrum open questions and write answers for them on a paper and practice it a lot. Because of the time limit, you should not write a lot, instead, try to answer just to the point with a few sentences.

Good Lock!

Related posts:

1- Preparation guide for the PSM I exam (Professional Scrum Master)

2- Preparation guide for the PSD I exam (Professional Scrum Developer)

3- Preparation guide for the PSPO I exam (Professional Scrum Product Owner)

4- Preparation guide for the PSM II exam (Professional Scrum Master II)

5- Preparation guide for the PAL I exam (Professional Agile Leadership I)

6- Preparation guide for the PSK I exam (Professional Scrum with Kanban I)

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Preparation guide for the PSM II exam

PSM II exam is a bit expensive, so we have provided a guide for the candidates to prepare, practice and pass it according to our experience.

Professional Scrum Master II

Scrum.org exams and in this case PSM II exam are challenging and a little bit expensive. So people want to know how they can pass these exams with more confidence. Therefore, we have decided to prepare a series of preparation guides for the Scrum.org exams.
Each guide contains minimum mandatory actions that should be done for passing the exam in a suitable timeframe. When we compare PSM II with PSM I, we should say level II is exponentially harder than level I. So, don’t take the exam before complete preparation.
In this post, we will introduce the PSM II exam (Professional Scrum Master II) step by step preparation guide as follows:

Books and Articles

  1. Read “The Scrum Guide” carefully word by word
  2. Read “The Nexus Guide” carefully
  3. “Coaching Agile Teams” book by Lyssa Adkins
  4. “Agile Retrospectives” book by Esther Derby
  5. “Scrum Mastery” book by Geoff Watts
  6. “Agile Estimating and Planning” book by Mike Cohn
  7. “User Stories Applied” book by Mike Cohn
  8. Read all posts about PSM II in Scrum.org forum
  9. ”The Scrum Values” blog post by Gunther Verheyen
  10. ”There’s Value in the Scrum Values” blog post by Gunther Verheyen
  11. ”5 Metaphors to Explore the Value of Scrum Values” blog post by Naghesh Sharma
  12. ”4 Ways to Coach with the Scrum Values” blog post by Stephanie Ockerman
  13. ”4 Key Flow Metrics and How to Use them in Scrum’s Events” blog post by Yuval Yeret
  14. ”Definition of Done” blog post by Gunther Verheyen

Complementary Materials

  1. Do all scrum open tests (scrum, product owner, developer, Nexus)
  2. Do 8 PSM II sample questions of theScrumMaster.co.uk by Simon Kneafsey
  3. Manage the time carefully and be in your highest energy state when you want to take the exam
  4. We highly recommend reading ScrumSchool.team PSM I exam tips and tricks training manual. It provides high-quality, deep, and tricky content that could be used as a reliable learning source that will help you for passing the PSM II exam.

Also, there are a lot of complementary resources that you can find in this link for the PSM II exam.

Related posts:

1- Preparation guide for the PSM I exam (Professional Scrum Master)

2- Preparation guide for the PSD I exam (Professional Scrum Developer)

3- Preparation guide for the PSPO I exam (Professional Scrum Product Owner)

4- Preparation guide for the PSM III exam (Professional Scrum Master III)

5- Preparation guide for the PAL I exam (Professional Agile Leadership I)

6- Preparation guide for the PSK I exam (Professional Scrum with Kanban I)

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How do Scrum developers manage architectural concerns?

Many Scrum developers and players are interested in knowing how to manage architectural and infrastructural concerns in Scrum. So, I have decided to explain it through this blog post.

How do Scrum developers manage architectural concerns?

Scrum developers manage architectural and infrastructural concerns

I almost always find that most Scrum developers and players ask about managing architectural and infrastructural concerns in Scrum. So, I have decided to explain it through a blog post. For managing these concerns, the Development Team should have some guidelines for deciding and handling architectural and infrastructural concerns. They should handle these concerns as a part of other Product Backlog Items during each Sprint. So they should pay for them incrementally or as enough as possible. This effort is just for finishing the forecasted Product Backlog Items of the Sprint.

Doing a lot upfront, to make a comprehensive architecture at the beginning of the project is a type of waste. Handling architecture should be done continuously based on the learnings that emerge during the Sprints. It is obvious that it uses more efforts at the early Sprints and decreases during the middle and last Sprints.

On the other hand, during each Sprint, the team should try to produce at least one releasable business functionality. This behavior’s main goal is gathering feedback from customers. Therefore, adding architectural and infrastructural items to the Product Backlog in order to do in the early Sprints is another valid policy.

Who is responsible?

In addition, the Development Team is cross-functional and has all required skills for producing releasable functionality and doing all technical works e.g. architectural and infrastructural concerns, design, develop, test and etc. It should be emphasized that doing these concerns through a separate team, sub-team or having a dependency on outside resources are not acceptable ways.

We have produced a training manual and a few practice assessments for all candidates who want to participate in the PSD I (Professional Scrum Developer) exam. You can find reliable answers there for many development and technical concerns.

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Book Review: Scrum Insights for Practitioners

Scrum Insights for Practitioners describes Scrum with simple sentences which helps you to understand Scrum and its concepts deeply.

Scrum Insights for Practitioners

 

Our mission is empowering Scrum players. One way is writing and publishing book reviews. These reviews can help interested people to choose better books and consume their time on valuable ones.

Today I want to write a review on “Scrum Insights for Practitioners” book by MR. Hiren Doshi. As I already mentioned in “Scrum A Pocket Guide” book review, when you read the Scrum Guide, you feel that you need other complementary sources to get a better understanding of the Scrum.

“Scrum Insights for Practitioners” is the best one that I recommend to all new Scrum players especially all Scrum.org exams candidates and all students who participate in my Scrum courses. I already posted a guideline for PSM I exam candidates called “Preparation guide for the PSM I exam” and mentioned these candidates should read this book to get ready for the exam.

This book describes Scrum with simple sentences which helps you to understand Scrum and its concepts deeply. For example, when you read the “Self-Organization” chapter, it shows and clears all related aspects of this concept in a perfect way. So, I absolutely recommend this book. I believe we should say thanks to MR. Hiren Doshi for creating this brilliant source.

You can contact MR. Doshi through this link: www.PracticeAgile.com

You can find  “Scrum Insights for Practitioners” book here on Amazon.

If you want to pass the Scrum.org exams, you can find our empowering Scrum exams candidates products here.

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Book Review: Scrum A Pocket Guide

Scrum A Pocket Guide is a brilliant book which brings and clears fundamental meanings behind the Scrum concepts for all Scrum practitioners.

Why writing a book review?

I am a big fan of reading. I admit that every day I read a book of Agile and Scrum profession. Recently, I have found that sharing my review about each book can make value for all interested people. So, I decided to start sharing my first review on my guru’s book i.e. MR. Gunther Verheyen. His book name is “Scrum A Smart Travel Companion – A Pocker Guide”. He continuously helps me in Scrum journey and lightens the road. I am really proud of having him in my life.

Now the book review:

I read this book twice during the two last years. When you read the Scrum Guide, you feel that you need another source to complement your Scrum understanding. This book is the most brilliant one. You find an extensive and deep explanation for each Scrum concept that can fill your mind gaps as a new Scrum practitioner or as a high-level player. I remember I read this book in 2017 for the first time when I was a little bit new with Scrum. But I read it again in 2019 when I was preparing myself for the PSM III exam, the hardest exam in the Scrum context all over the world. From this position and point of view, I found it brings a distinguished knowledge which supports you for such a hard exam. I really like its “Scrum” and ” tactics for a purpose” chapters which clear the fundamental meanings behind many concepts of the Scrum.
So, I should say my special thanks to MR. Gunther Verheyen for his great book and we should be so faithful because we have him with us.
You can find Gunther’s articles on his website in this link:
https://guntherverheyen.com/

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Scrum Developer knowledge checklist

Every high-performance, autonomous and knowledgeable Scrum Developer should know about following list:

Technical Section

  • Managing architectural and infrastructural concerns in Scrum
  • TDD, ATDD, BDD, DDD
  • Unit Test
  • Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment
  • Feature Sketch, wireframe, mockup, prototype
  • Sunny Day, Rainy Day
  • Various Tests
  • Static Analysis, Dynamic Analysis
  • Test Doubles
  • Code Quality Metrics
  • Automated build and automated tests
  • Pair Programming
  • SOLID, DRY, YAGNI, KISS
  • Design Patterns
  • Technical Debt

Scrum Foundation

  • Scrum Values
  • Source Control
  • Code Refactoring
  • Managing Non-Functional Requirements
  • Adaptive Approach
  • Agile Principles
  • Empiricism
  • Sprint
  • How behave in Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective
  • How collaborate with Product Owner, Scrum Master and other Developers
  • Making mistakes frequently
  • Having many constructive conflicts
  • Thinking out of the box
  • Help the customers to be more successful
  • Living with definition of Done and evolve it continuously
  • Living with Sprint Goal
  • Monitoring Sprint progress
  • Offering help to other colleagues
  • Being self-organize
  • Mastering in estimation
  • Preventing context switching
  • Collaborating in Product Backlog Refinement
  • Using Acceptance Criteria in feature development
  • Managing dependencies in Scaled Scrum
  • Continuous improvement (process, product, him/herself)

Finally, for being high-performance, autonomous and knowledgeable Scrum Developer and improving your knowledge, we suggest taking the PSD I exam. To be succeed in this exam use https://elearning.scrumschool.org PSD I tips and tricks training manual. It provides high-quality, deep and tricky content as a reliable learning source which help you pass the real exam with more confidence.

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How a new Scrum Master should join a team?

Making a good relationship with the Team and organization and observing the Team’s dynamics would be the first steps when a Scrum Master join a company.

Join a Scrum Master to a team

At first, she should try to know her teammates one by one. She should share with them her backgrounds, biography, thoughts, and life. Also listens to their backgrounds, biography, thoughts, and life to establish a trust foundation. Also, she should make a relationship with other Scrum Masters in the organization. Asks them about their policies for promoting and adopting Scrum over the organization.
Then she should try to know more about the product, its vision, roadmaps, its customers, stakeholders and technologies that are used in the development process. Furthermore, she should check the CI/CD implementation’s status. How the Team uses the DoD concept and how they live with Scrum Values. Also, she should attend to the all Scrum events as an eager observer to understand status-quo and know these ceremonies’ performance level.
On the other hand, she should work with the Product Owner to know how effective (s)he manages the Product Backlog. Also how (s)he collaborates with customers and stakeholders.
Totally, making a good relationship with the Team and organization and observing the Team’s dynamics would be the main focus. This blending prepares the Scrum Master to start serving the Team to live with the Scrum more effective.

Why Scrum could be a successful way to create high-quality software?

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Preparation guide for the PSPO I exam

PSPO I exam is a little bit expensive, so we have provided a guide for the candidates to prepare, practice and pass it with more confidence.

Professional Scrum Product Owner I

Scrum.org exams and in this case PSPO I exam are challenging and a little bit expensive. So people want to know how they can pass these exams with more confidence. Therefore, we have decided to prepare a series of preparation guides for the Scrum.org exams.

Each guide contains minimum mandatory actions that should be done for passing the exam in a suitable timeframe.

In this post, we will introduce the PSPO I exam (Professional Scrum Product Owner) step by step preparation guide as follows:

Books and Materials

Assessments and Practices

Also, there are a lot of complementary books that you can find in this link for the PSPO I exam.

Related posts:

1-Preparation guide for the PSM I exam (Professional Scrum Master)

2-Preparation guide for the PSD I exam (Professional Scrum Developer)

3-Preparation guide for the PSM II exam (Professional Scrum Master II)

4- Preparation guide for the PSM III exam (Professional Scrum Master III)

5- Preparation guide for the PAL I exam (Professional Agile Leadership I)

6- Preparation guide for the PSK I exam (Professional Scrum with Kanban I)

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Why Scrum could be a successful way to create high quality software?

Creating quality software through Scrum is a fundamental question that many people have. So in this post we explained how Scrum could help teams to create high quality softwares.

Creating quality software through Scrum

Scrum embraces uncertainties of software development

Software development is a highly complex activity, with many uncertainties that are intrinsically part of the work. Every software product or application is a new product, that was never built in the same way before, i.e. with the same requirements, using the same technology, by the same people. Customers don’t know exactly and in every possible detail what they want at the beginning. And, even if they think they do, they likely forced to change their mind; by changes of the market, competitors, or internal strategies.

Software development is a complex work

When mapped on the Cynefin model, software development clearly belongs to the complex category of the model. Complexity is the domain of unknown-unknowns. This requires an empirical approach and emergent practice to harness it. To be successful, it is essential that the applied process makes the unknown-unknowns visible and transparent. Also performing the works through an inspect and adapt approach, called ‘probe-sense-respond’ in the model. Therefore, we need an approach that fits with the explained characteristics to cope with the many uncertainties typical to software development.

Cynefin framework - Scrum solves complex problems

(picture from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework)

Scrum uses empirical process control

Scrum is an empirical process designed to address complex adaptive problems to harness complexity and uncertainties. It guides the Team in two parallel ways to improve continuously. In Scrum we produce the highest value features in a Sprint while improving the process we apply to create those product features. Scrum lays down boundaries that decrease the risk of developing the wrong features. The rules and the time-boxes of Scrum assure that we collect feedback quickly and timely.

Scrum uses feedback loops

(Picture by Gunther Verheyen – Ullizee-Inc)

ُSprints contain all work which is no more than 4 weeks, so we get feedback from stakeholders based on created increments sooner rather than later. Scrum offers effective inspect and adapt opportunities that allow determining the most appropriate next steps to take, taking into account the latest information on the market, product, customer, budget, etc.

Scrum leads to creating the right thing and thing right

Additionally, you ensure that you’ll create highest value features through Sprint Planning, Team inspect and adapt the Sprint plan through Daily Scrums, get first-hand feedback directly from stakeholders in the Sprint Review and finally improve the development process through Sprint Retrospective, continuously. The Definition of Done makes sure there is a clear and shared agreement of the quality criteria that the product should meet, possibly including passing code quality metrics and non-functional requirements like performance and stability. Consequently, all mentioned concepts and rules help the Team to ensure that they are moving in the right direction and are developing high value and quality software.

*Mr. Gunther Verheyen reviewed and evolved this post. Special thanks to him.