Certified ScrumMaster

Certified ScrumMaster Workshop

All CSM courses are taught by Certified Scrum Trainers. Taking a CSM course, passing the CSM test, and accepting the license agreement designates you as a Certified ScrumMaster, which indicates that you have been introduced to and understand the basic concepts you need to perform as a ScrumMaster or team member on a Scrum team. This course also satisfies two elements of the CSD track: Scrum Introduction and Elective.

Scrum is simple, consisting of a small set of practices you can implement yourself right? Wrong! That’s why as many as 75% of internally driven Scrum adoptions struggle to realize the full spectrum of benefits promised by Scrum. Gregory Smith, Principal Consultant with ThoughtWorks, shapes his 16 years of technical and project leadership expertise into a Certified ScrumMaster course crisply focused on enabling you to lead or participate in a successful Scrum adoption.

This course offers the pragmatic guidance needed to understand and realize the holistic organization shaping power hidden within the simple Scrum framework. Like every other ScrumMaster course this one will teach you the Scrum basics. You will also gain a broad understanding of the Agile movement, the transformational values it expresses, and learn tips on driving their adoption through even the most challenging and resistant organizations. No amount of Agile values and Scrum practices will allow your teams to embrace change however if you do not also focus on lowering the cost of technical change. This Course also highlights the key software engineering practices you will need to understand in order to truly realize all of Scrum’s promised benefits.

Greg will teach you how the 3 key aspects of a Scrum adoption program; Scrum project/product management practices, XP software engineering practices and fundamental Agile software development values, must be combined to allow you, your teams and organization to truly realize the transformational power of Scrum.

Every participant will receive the following:

• ScrumAlliance ScrumMaster Certification 
• 1 year membership in ScrumAlliance (a $50 value) 
• Includes access to additional ScrumAlliance resources and articles 
• Printed version of all course materials. 
• PMPs: You can receive 14 Project Management Institute PDUs for this course.

All registered participants will receive detailed instructions for accessing the facility prior to the course.

Agile Scrum Foundations 

• The ideological relationship between Agile, Scrum and XP 
• Putting fundamental Agile, Scrum and XP values into practice 

Scrum, an Aerial View 

• Iterative and Incremental development 
• Scrum adoption success and failure indicators 
• Empirical and predictive process controls 
• Scrum’s origin, direction, cycles and cadence

Talking the Talk 

• Scrum and agile terminology demystified 
• Scrum roles, responsibilities and commitment levels

Continuous Improvement exercise

Walking the Walk

• Self organizing, self directing teams 
• Before-during-after sprint activity cycle 
• Focus and purpose of each Scrum meeting 
• Net present value and the definition of “done”

 Metrics that Matter

• Delivery vs. activity based tracking 
• Applicability of metrics vs. diagnostics 
• Burn-ups and Burn-downs 
• Commitment based planning vs. capacity based planning

Daily Scrum dynamics (exercise)

User Stories

• User story basics and format 
• Thin slicing stories 
• Acceptance criteria and format 
• Stories, requirements and use cases

 Agile estimation techniques

• Estimation variance 
• Estimation units and scales 
• Coping with uncertainty

Release planning in Scrum

• Plan a release (exercise) 
• Discovery, inception and Sprint-0

 Distributed Scrum Simulation exercise

 Selling Scrum, adoption models 

• Bottom up and top down models
• Adoption barriers and overcoming them

Agile Retrospectives

While this course provides a necessary foundation for anyone aspiring to personally become a Certified ScrumMaster and build successful Scrum teams the applicability is much wider than ScrumMasters alone. A successful Scrum adoption program is “change” writ large, so everyone with an interest or stake in adopting, tuning or running a Scrum practice in their organization should attend.

This course is highly recommended for everyone in an organization who might be asked to perform any part of their responsibilities differently in support of a Scrum team or program. A successful Scrum adoption program should include some changes for a wide variety of roles and all are highly encouraged to participate in this course, some examples including

• software developers
• quality analysts
• business analysts
• line managers
• project managers
• program managers
• application and enterprise architects
• IT budget managers
• IT budget approvers
• CTOs, CIOs or other executive managers with a stake in a smoothly running software production effort