My Journey To PSM I Certification

I passed my PSM I Certification on 15th March 2013. I got my self certified with no paid scrum master courses and purely based on self study. I want to help people in same situation as mine.

When I got my self reading Scrum in details I was thrilled. I just read on and it reinforced my beliefs. I still have few questions , but in general I think Scrum is the most innovative and fruitful software development model ever envisaged till date.

So I decided to get my understanding a test and took PSM I Certification !

Step 1 : Off-course scrum guide at scrum.org -  Scrum Guide. This is the starting point and just a starting point. You need to read it couple of times till you understand each line. While I was reading it , I made some notes with some visual effects. It helped me to review very quickly. You have the link to my notes - Visual Scrum Guide Notes.

Step 2 : After I read the scrum guide , I tried to google scrum. What I found most useful was to watch few videos about scrum , few basic and few detailed. I enjoyed listing to these here - Favorite Scrum Videos.
The best part of the videos are where speakers share their personal experience with Scrum, and that gives idea about how industry might be thinking.

Step 3 : By now , I was very acquainted with Scrum fundamentals. I took the open assessment from scrum.org - Scrum Open Assessment. I took it many time , until I reached 100% for couple of times. There would be many repeats of the exact same questions - So Pay Attention. If I had to guess , at-least 25 repeats from open assessment.
Irony is that when you take the open assessment , it will repeat the questions also. It will be very boring, but in every retake of open assessment you will find 4-5 questions different. Try to exhaust the pool they have for open questions. This is your best ally in this certification.

Step 4 : Build a scrum mindset by calibrating your thought procedure the scrum way. What I mean by this is that you should be absolutely clear about the following points. There are the main points which PSM I will actually test that you understand.
* Every member of Scrum team has a different role. They will trick you by shifting the scrum responsibilities. Be very clear what they are exactly supposed to do.
* What is the importance of each meeting. Who organizes it and whats the takeaway. You really should understand why it is done. The best way is to think what would be missing if this meeting was not help.
* Think of all possible problems ( developer not punctual , task not completed till end of sprint , lots of bugs from previous sprint etc ) and try to dry run in scrum environment.

If you found my article help , do drop me a line below. Thanks !!!