My CSM Training Experience

As promised, albeit a few days late, here are some details regarding my certified scrum master training experience. As I mentioned in my last post, I'm not a big fan of certifications proving anything one way or the other, but I am always trying to learn, and it seemed like a good idea to get away from the office for a few days to learn a few new things.

My instructor was Alistair Cockburn, one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto. He gets around a fair amount and has plenty of quotes from many others whose names are frequently bandied about in agile discussions. One of the first points that he made during the course was the importance of avoiding dogma, but rather assembling a bag of tricks, and using each only as they make sense for a given customer, team, and projects. Given that this is basically the SmartAgile mantra, I was on board.

Day 1

We covered general topics such as iterative work, close interaction with the customer, 2 people at a whiteboard vs. a document, etc. Most of the exercises served multiple purposes of realizing how things can go wrong, understanding how a best practice can apply, then applying it to experience the benefits. An effective and entertaining teaching method.

Day 2

This day was basically our Scrum boot camp, covering all of the basics of Scrum, such as the scrum meetings, artifacts, and roles. As it happens, Alistair has issues with various Scrum practices such as moving practically straight to coding (unless you employ a trick like "Sprint 0"), which I agree are a bit cuckoo. He often mentioned that some of the things he was teaching were Scrum practices enforced by the Scrum peasants (torches, pitchforks, etc.), but weren't necessarily his recommendations, depending on the circumstances. Again, dogma -- bad, best practices/bag of tricks -- good. He also covered the Agile Manifesto, throwing in some interesting tidbits about some of the discussions that led to the final version.

Day 3

This was my favorite day of the training. The main two activities were a development project exercise (five 10-minute iterations) and a project planning exercise using a "Blitz Planning" approach. One lesson of the day was the importance of breaking down work to quick slices that result in demonstrable progress for the customer. Another lesson was an approach for rapid planning with story cards. These exercises caused me to think in a different way, which is a nice compliment to the instructor and course.

Summary

Alistair pulls from a very assorted grab bag, and during the training discussed various approaches from methods/frameworks such as Crystal (the framework he created), XP, DSDM, Lean, Kanban, RUP, etc. I'm not sure I would pass a test on what exactly Scrum is, but who cares. At the end of the day I had a nice long retrospective on what I should stop doing, what I should keep doing, and I learned about a number of new tricks to take for a spin.

There were a few people in the class who were beginners. My guess is that they left with some good ideas, but that they would fall flat on their faces if they hoped that their shiny new certificates would ensure a successful implementation of Scrum at their places of businesses. Change always requires an experienced, competent champion. A few days of training won't get you there. Then again, another friend who teaches scrum master certification courses told me that he merely teaches to glean the consulting that results, so I'm sure that these beginners, having caught the vision but really not knowing where to start, could engage an experienced agile consultant, and at least they would have a clue of what was coming and could provide helpful assistance to give the effort a fighting chance.

Have any of you attended a scrum master certification training? I'd be interested to hear your stories.