Devops for Growth

Be Careful with Compatibility

There are many resources for Scrum and Kanban, but not all of them are compatible with these exams — even some of them that come from reputable authors. So, be careful with that.

How Many Choices?

The PSM, PSPO, and PSK exams are not normal multiple‑choice exams. You may have questions that ask you to select more than one choice (e.g., Which two of the following are…). You wouldn’t believe how many people miss that and just pick one choice!

So, read the question carefully to understand when more than one choice is required. Sometimes, the question specifies the number of choices, and sometimes it just tells you to pick multiple choices. The choices in these questions have check-boxes (small squares) instead of radio buttons (small circles); so, make sure you get used to noticing that as well.

NOT!

“Which of the following is NOT a responsibility of…”

“All of the following are responsibilities of… EXCEPT for…”

Sadly, many people miss these capitalized negative words and pick the wrong answer. This is more common when the question is more complicated and you become so engaged in assessing the correctness of the statements that you forget the question was asking for the wrong statement instead of the right one.

Be very careful with this type of question, and pay serious heed to it if you make this mistake in your simulated exams.

Damned Details!

You know that the Daily Scrum meetings are for the Development Team members, and only they are required to attend the meeting. Others can still go there and observe them — even people from other projects (to learn something new from them) — but they only observe, and they shouldn’t talk.

Take these statements:

1. The Product Owner can attend the Daily Scrum meetings.
2. The Product Owner can participate in the Daily Scrum meetings.

Are these statements true or false?

The first one is simple: It’s true. The second one, however, is false because “participate” implies engagement, whereas everyone except the Development Team members is only supposed to be observing.

There are many questions like this, where a single word changes everything. You need to be careful with it.

Modal Verbs

Let’s continue the example from the previous tip. What do you think about the following statements?

1. The Product Owner can attend the Daily Scrum meetings.
2. The Product Owner should attend the Daily Scrum meetings.

While the first statement is true, the second one is false, and it’s all because of the modal verbs. It’s correct that the Product Owner is allowed to attend the meeting, but it doesn’t mean that it’s necessary for them to be there.

In case you’re wondering, in the exam, “can” means “may”, and “should” means “ought to”/“required to”, similarly to the way English is used by most people nowadays.

Look It Up!

The PSM, PSPO, and PSK exams are in open-book format, so, you should make sure you take advantage of that. Have a copy of the Scrum Guide (and also the Kanban for Scrum Teams Guide for the PSK exam) open and ready for reference. As well as this, while you’re practicing with the sample questions, write down all the points that are troubling you, organize them, and have them ready to use during your exam. It’s better to write your notes in a file rather than on paper, so that you can search them easily.

Note that the amount of time you have for each question is less than what you have in most other exams, and you can only look up the concepts when you’ve had enough practice, you manage your time perfectly, and you’re completely familiar with the resources you’re using. So, again, remember to practice this in your simulated exams.

The Scrum Guide

Things would have been much easier if the Scrum Guide could be used to answer every question, but that’s not the case. Most questions in the exam cannot be answered based solely on the Scrum Guide, so, don’t expect otherwise.

Besides the above, some questions in the exam are based on certain interpretations of the Scrum Guide (the way Scrum.org sees it). For example, how many Product Owners do we have in scaled Scrum? One of the co-authors of the Scrum Guide believes that there must be one and only one Product Owner, no matter how many teams you have, while the other co-author believes that it’s a good idea to have multiple Product Owners, and a Chief Product Owner. Which one do you think is supported in the Scrum Guide? Both!

Finally, some points in the Scrum Guide are not clear enough; for example, the number of Definitions of Done for multiple teams, and what most people understand based on the guide, which is different from what they are expected to answer in the exam.

Quelques chiffres mis à jour le 01/06/2019, que vous retrouverez ici sous forme de tableau :

Nous pouvons observer que les premiers niveaux de certifications, étant prisés, sont victimes de leur succès. Cependant, il est estimé que le taux de réussite ne dépasse pas les 30% toutes certifications confondues.

N’hésitez pas à construire votre propre plan de certifications correspondant au but que vous vous êtes fixé.

A lire : Un article intéressant (en anglais) sur l’optimisation de l’ordre de passage des certifications Scrum.

Here are a couple key concepts to remember that might be different from what you may have learned or heard elsewhere:

• The Scrum guide does not define a pre-planning stage (iteration 0), and the goal of the first sprint is a potentially releasable product. Many agile teams across industries include these, but they are not part of the official Scrum framework. 
• Understand the underlying empirical control process that is the basis for all Agile processes. Empiricism exercises control through focusing on Transparency, Inspection, and Adaption in a similar model to the Scientific method.
• Scrum Guide defines a Sprint Goal and only allows canceling the sprint if the goal becomes obsolete, which is determined by the product owner.
• The Scrum Guide includes heavy emphasis on structured autonomy of the Scrum team. The people doing the development understand best what is involved in needing to build a quality, potentially releasable product every sprint. 
• The product owner is responsible for maximizing value of the work the Scrum team completes. While the product owner is responsible for the product backlog and its “ordering”, they do not have to do all the work to accomplish this. They can work with and rely on the Scrum team to do so.
• A good product owner does not control all the flow of information to/from the team, but helps connect the team with whoever is needed (stakeholders, users, technical leads, other business representatives, etc.) so they can get the most direct answer possible with minimal lag time or handoff loss. 

The Scrum Guide has been updated to make it less prescriptive, using simpler language to address a wider audience. These changes have been done to make Scrum a "lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems".

The changes between 2017 and 2020 Scrum Guides are:

1. Even less prescriptive
2. One team, focused on one product
3. Introduction of product goal
4. A home for Sprint Goal, Definition of Done, and Product Goal
5. Self-managing over self-organizing
6. Three sprint planning topics
7. Overall simplification of language for a wider audience

Peopleware is a popular book about software organization management. The first chapter of the book claims, "The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature". The book approaches sociological or 'political' problems such as group chemistry and team jelling, "flow time" and quiet in the work environment, and the high cost of turnover. Other topics include the conflicts between individual work perspective and corporate ideology, corporate entropy, "teamicide" and workspace theory.

The authors presented most subjects as principles backed up by some concrete story or other information. As an example, the chapter "Spaghetti Dinner" presents a fictional example of a manager inviting a new team over for dinner, then having them buy and prepare the meal as a group, in order to produce a first team success. Other chapters use real-life stories or cite various studies to illustrate the principles being presented.

Assume that there are no “perfect” answers… Only “best” answers — when wearing your “Scrum Principles Wizard” hat. Answer as if you were the author of the Scrum Guide yourself.