Sunday 9 March 2008

Certified Scrum Master

Yep. It's true! I'm now a certified scrum master.

This week I attended "Agile Project Coaching and Project Management with Scrum Certification" which was teached by Martine Devos.
The course was more a workshop than a lecture and I really enjoyed it even though I knew most of the theory from before. The way she spoke about her practical experience in regards to getting things done, the pragmatic approach to teach us about the different techniques of agile was great. It was highly influenced by questions and people got really good answers supplied with examples and stories from the real world.

She talked about the importance of showing progress and visibility in the team, part of the solution there is big charts!

Another important issue she brought up was agile planning. Yes, there is actually more to this than just an iteration (sprint). We did an exercise and put together three sprints and made a release plan for this. The first sprint was more detailed than the second and it was more detailed than the third sprint.
The idea is not to waste your time in details of later sprints as the customer or even the world may change its course before you actually are to implement it. Maybe you even learned of a better way to do it. But you need to know something of whats coming up the road. Things like, is it big, medium or small? Is it complex? Does it involve others or only your team?
Take things into account, but don't use all your precious time on the details. Use common sense.

With all this in my backpack I'm looking forward to Wednesday where Mike Cohn is talking about agile estimation and planning. See you at xp.meetup!