What, I Have to Pass a Test to become a Certified ScrumMaster??!By David Bulkin

The Past, The October 1st Future, of ScrumMaster Certification

Those who are certified as ScrumMasters are known as CertifiedScrum Masters (CSMs). The CSM has continually grown in popularity as the acceptance of agile has grown, perhaps synergistically. In the past, to become a CSM, you simply attended, participated in, and completed a 2 or more day CSM course taught by a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST). Starting on October 1st, this changes.

In Short, Take a September Class, or Take the Test

In short, if you take a CSM class, and this course completes before October 1st, you won’t need to take the exam to become a Certified ScrumMaster. If, you take a class after this, you will need to pass the new exam in order to become certified.

Information from Scrum Alliance Website:

Effective 1 October 2009, all CSMs will be required to complete a Certified ScrumMaster course and pass a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) online certification exam to maintain certification.

Certification Duration:
Effective 1 October 2009, certifications will be valid for two years from the date when the CSM passes his or her certification exam. If an individual takes a CSM course after 30 September 2009, he or she will have ninety days after the course date to pass the certification exam.

If an individual earned his or her certification prior to 1 April 2009, the individual must take the initial online certification exam by 1 April 2011 to maintain certification.

If an individual earned his or her certification between 1 April 2009 and 1 October 2009, the individual will have two years from the course date to pass the CSM exam and maintain certification.

Recertification Process:
To recertify, CSMs who have not previously passed the CSM exam will required to do so. CSMs who have previously passed the CSM exam will not be required to retake it. The recertification fee is $150.

In Closing

Anyone interested in becoming a CSM should seriously think about taking a class this September to avoid the extra effort and expense of taking the exam.

The Almost Daily Sit Downs

You can find literally hundreds of blog posts and articles on the Daily Standup, a.k.a. Daily Scrum. But there is little written about what often comes, or at least should come, after, the Daily Standup.

What, you may ask should come after the Daily Standup? Well, the Almost Daily Sit-Downs of course! By the way, if you haven't heard the term before, I just coined it.

The Daily Standup

Before we go into the Almost Daily Sit-Downs, let’s look briefly at the Daily Standup. The Daily Standup is held each working day (with few exceptions) and is attended by the core team (the Pigs in Scrum parlance) and potentially others. The goal is to finish the meeting in 15 minutes, so only the core team members are allowed to speak, and each person has approximately 1 to 2 minutes (assuming < 10 people) to answer:

1. What I did yesterday (since the last Daily Standup)?
2. What I will do today (before the next Daily Standup)?
3. What blockers are in the way?

Focus on Coordination

These questions are deceptively simple, but many are confused about how much detail to give in
response. As a result, Daily Standups often end up taking much more than the allotted 15 minutes. When this happens, I recommend one word to guide individuals and teams as they answer the three questions; “coordination”.

If you focus on giving just the information required to coordinate effectively, the meeting will be more effective.  The information passed along will help the team make commitments to each other, and self manage, but you will invariably have to leave some things out. For example, perhaps you would like to talk about something you learned.

You could say this...
“Yesterday I found out something incredibly interesting and valuable about transforming the new XML file that we receive, if you want to, blah, blah, blah.”

But, it would be better to say...
“Yesterday I found some valuable information about how to transform the new XML file that we receive. I believe that Venkat, Ellie and Carly will benefit, so we can have a sit down after this meeting to discuss, and anyone else who wants to learn more can also come.”

Or maybe when you are talking about what you are going to do today, you want to go into detail, so that the team can give you input.

You could say this...
“Today I am going to work on the new database cache approach to speed up data access. I am going to create a set of new tables on the application server. As each new request comes in, blah, blah, blah."

But it would be better to say...
“Today I will work on the new database cache approach to speed up data access. This will rely on storing frequently accessed data on the application server, and I can use help on the design. Can anyone sit down with me after this meeting to help me think this through?”

Defer the Details and Problem Solving to the Almost Daily Sit-Downs

Depending on the particular day, it is possible that the team will need several sit down meetings, and on other days, none will be required. The key is that you hold a sit down meeting only when required (hence the "Almost Daily" part of the name).

Using the Almost Daily Sit-Downs for the detailed discussion and problem solving allows a team to focus the Daily Standup on coordination, so that team members can answer the three-questions in a rapid fashion, making the Daily Standup a concise and effective coordination mechanism.

Your Experience

We are always interested in your experience, so please respond with your thoughts about how your team operates today?

• Does your team have Almost Daily Sit-Downs?
• Does your team focus their discussion at the Daily Standup on coordination?
• If your team doesn’t have effective Daily Standups, can they improve by focusing on coordination and deferring the details until the Almost Daily Sit-Downs?

VersionOne 2009 State of Agile Survey

VersionOne is seeking input for their 2009 State of Agile survey. Take the survey here: http://surveys.versionone.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=1299357&ext_ref=400.

PMI Agile Launch Event @ Agile 2009

The PMI Agile Community of Practice will be launching at Agile 2009. Join Martin Fowler, Mike Griffiths, Alistair Cockburn, Jesse Fewell, Michele Sliger, Pat Reed, Dan Mezick, Brian Bozzuto, George Sclitz and me for an exciting event.

More details are here: http://agile-pm.pbworks.com/Launch-Activities.

Or, you can register directly for the event here: http://connect.thoughtworks.com/agileoffice/.

Hope to see you there!

Agile 2009: 1-on-1 Consulting - Get free Assistance from an Agile Expert

New to agile, want to fine tune your process, or want to share your expertise? The LiveAid Lab will be facilitating 1-on-1 sessions between people with questions and experts in the field who know how to put agile theory into practice. You can:

1. Become a 1-on-1 Mentor:

Sign up at the Live Aid Stage to provide consulting during the conference or email: sanjiv DOT scrum AT gmail DOT com, prior to the conference. We need all disciplines from agile teams as mentors. Now is the time to share your expertise and meet new people in the process.

2. Consult with a One on One Mentor:

Sign up at the Live Aid Stage to request consulting during the conference or email sanjiv DOT scrum AT gmail DOT com prior to the conference. No question is too easy or difficult for these 1-on-1 sessions. Each mentor will work with you on the topic of your choice and may show you live examples from the Mano a Mano project being developed during the conference.

During the conference, simply stop by the LiveAid area to sign up to give or receive consulting.

Potential Topics: Estimation and Planning, Managing Agile Teams, Story Card Writing, Project Walls, Test Driven Development, Kicking off Agile Projects, Agile Portfolio Management, Setting up Team Rooms, Running an Iteration, Agile Usability and Architecture, Agile Team Roles, Paired Programming, Continuous Integration, Testing and QA on Agile Teams, Automated Acceptance Testing, and Organizational Transformation.

Gearing up for Agile 2009 -- See you There?

This time of year, while we're counting down the dog days of summer, we are also looking forward to another successful agile conference.

This year, Agile 2009 will be held in Chicago, and is likely to draw old hands, newbies, and the generally curious. Agile methods are mainstream in the IT space these days, and I expect that many companies large and small will be sending their emissaries.

Agile guru Alistair Cockburn will be a keynote speaker, so I would expect that we will be hearing about some of the foundational principles of Agile. I believe the conference was the brain child of Alistair's, and know that he organized the first (combined XP and Agile) conference in Salt Lake City (with belly dancers and all).

LitheSpeed involvement in the conference will be in these areas:

1. Arlen Bankston will be co-presenting with Kevin Fisher of Nationwide Insurance. Expect to hear a story of the tremendous original work done by a crack Agile team at Nationwide in the area of the kanban-style progressive elaboration of product requirements across 21 teams.
2. I will be co-producing the LiveAid stage with Bob Payne. Live Aid is gaining momentum and we are excited about teaming with the User Experience stage. The LiveAid lab allows attendees to participate in a real agile project that directly benefits a not-for-profit organization.
3. I will be coordination a consulting one-on-one exchange for people connecting people who need consulting help with consultants who will be offering it pro bono.
4. The PMI Agile Community of Practice will be launching at party hosted by ThoughtWorks. Register for the event here.
5. Several PMI Agile Committee members (Brian Bozzuto, Jesse Fewell, Mike Griffiths, Dan Mezick, Ainsley Nies, Pat Reed, Michele Sliger and Sanjiv Augustine) will be at the conference -- make sure you connect with one of us to learn more and to get involved.

As always, I expect that the conference will be simultaneously busy, hectic, fun, invigorating, and an all-round tremendous experience.

Personally, it's always been a great time to connect with old friends, meet new ones and learn one heck of a lot.

Hope to see many of you there! You can find me at the LiveAid stage area Monday through Thursday, and it'll be good to connect in person.

Agile Project Time Management

Jurgen Appelo has a nice, concise post on agile project time management on his Blog: http://www.noop.nl/2008/06/10-principles-of-agile-project-time-management.html.

Agile 2009 Presentation - From Cradle to Sprint: Creating a Full-Lifecycle Request Pipeline at Nationwide

I will be co-presenting a session entitled From Cradle to Sprint: Creating a Full-Lifecycle Request Pipeline at Nationwide Insurance alongside Nationwide’s Kevin Fisher at the upcoming Agile 2009 conference in Chicago, IL. We will discuss how LitheSpeed helped them to adapt Scrum for a monumental, 18-team project that spanned much of the company .

The presentation focuses on how Corporate Internet Solution's RedFishBlueFish team addressed key issues such as aligning multiple powerful stakeholders, integrating robust user experience design and testing into a Scrum model, and addressing dependencies across all of the teams with powerful, lightweight techniques.

We hope to see you there!