Scrum Master Certification: PSM 1 Study Guide
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    • Scrum Master Certification: PSM 1 Study Guide
    • Introduction
    • Why You Should Read This Book
    • What Is Scrum?
    • The Scrum Guide (and what it doesn’t tell you)
    • A Few More Things That The Scrum Guide Doesn’t Tell You
    • One Last Thing...

A Brief Scrum Overview And What The Scrum Guide Doesn't Tell You

What Is Scrum?

Aside from being a funny word to say and a thing that they do in rugby, it is also a framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value. The intent is to be a simple framework for complex products. There is an emphasis on software development however it does not have to be contained within that box.

If you are reading this book, I assume that you are already familiar with a lot of the keywords like sprint, daily scrum, backlog, increment, etc. so we will not spend time going over these things before moving on.

The Scrum Guide (and what it doesn’t tell you)

The Scrum co-creators Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland wrote the Scrum Guide to explain Scrum clearly and succinctly. The Scrum Guide is free and can be found at this location: https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-is-scrum

Here is the unfortunate thing that a lot of people do not realize about the Scrum Guide in conjunction with the Professional Scrum Master Certification Exam: It does NOT give you everything that you need. When I first started down this path, I thought that I would just read the Scrum Guide until I was blue in the face, keep a printed copy of it next to me during the exam, and I’d pass with flying colors. I was wrong.

While the Scrum Guide does give you a large portion of the principles and ideas that you’ll need to know, there’s still a lot of material that it simply does not cover that will be on the certification exam. That is why I believe a book like this is very helpful as it sheds light and provides insight into those things.

Whenever I was preparing to take the exam, I found some online quiz that allowed you to take a few sample questions just to see what kind of things you would come up against. I expected to ace it on the first try. I remember one of the questions being something along the lines of “A Scrum of Scrums should be attended by Scrum Masters from across the organization.”

I had no idea how to answer that. I double checked my scrum guide and did not see a single reference to “Scrum of Scrums”. That’s when I realized that simply reading the Scrum Guide would not get me all the way there.

(The answer, by the way, is FALSE)

A Few More Things That The Scrum Guide Doesn’t Tell You

I recall encountering several questions about the “Agile Manifesto” which is another thing that is not mentioned on the Scrum Guide. Here is a snippet about that from Agile Alliance:

“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”

I’m going to be honest with you. The first time you read through it does sound a bit weird. Once you soak it in though, it kind of starts to make a bit of sense because it does fall in line with the core of what agile is about. From the exam perspective though, it is my recommendation that you check out the Agile Manifesto and definitely recall the bullet point items above. Sometimes on the test it will give you a list of phrases on the left to match up with the appropriate answer on the right. The bullet points above are a perfect example of how that might appear.

Backlog “Grooming” is another word for Backlog Refinement. That’s a true / false answer that’s just waiting to trip you up because nowhere in the Scrum Guide is it going to use the word “Grooming”. The answer, however, is TRUE.

The Scrum Values are referenced in the guide, however, the guide makes it sound way more confusing than what kind of answers the exam is going to be looking for. The key thing there is to know that the 5 Scrum Values are:

  • Commitment
  • Courage
  • Focus
  • Openness
  • Respect

Although they are not referenced in the guide, you will most likely encounter some questions about Burn Down Charts and/or Velocity Charts. Lucky for you, they are pretty simple concepts to learn and remember.

A Burn Down Chart is used to track sprints in progress or for sprint retrospectives. They display comparisons of outstanding work against available time. Think of it as a way to view and measure the progress of a release or sprint from start to finish compared to what the daily progress is.

A Velocity Chart can help determine how many points worth of work can be completed per sprint for a given team. It’s important to remember that velocity charts can only be viewed for completed sprints unlike burn down charts. The chart will show the estimated effort in story points delivered across multiple sprints.

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