There you go. I’m now a certified Scrum Master. Admittedly, it was ridiculously easy to get “certified” … so much so that it should probably not be called a certification (just go to the course for 2 days, and give them your email and voila!).

The course was ok, but far from great. A couple obvious problems:

  • 2 days is not enough. Not by a longshot. We were rushing through everything with not much time to delve into deeper questions and issues
  • Obviously, in a course like this, a lot of leaders will be present. And that’s not meant in a good way. Because of the time constraints, we were continuously rushing to begin exercises without proper information on what we needed to do or how. Therefore, a lot of people inside the same teams wanted to bulldoze and force their ways on others. Yes, I get it: “Agile == team work”. But 2 days wasn’t enough to develop any type of team work inside the teams especially since a lot of members were annoyed with one another.

I had been using agile concepts for a few years, but never did the real thing because I was missing a few key concepts. Going to the course forced me to look into those things, and talk to people about real world experience with Scrum.

Starting on Monday, I’ll be applying a few of the things I learned, but without the whole wizz-bang.

  • Obviously, iterations will be part of it. I’d been doing those for a while, but this time they’ll be much better structured with a review and demo.
  • Continuous integration: I just got a Hudson server up and running and all our tests will need to be runnable inside an automated environment. Again, my teams and I have been doing unit tests for a while, but I’ve never automated them. (btw: This won’t be TDD. The jury is still out for me as far as full blown TDD goes – I’ll post my opinions on that later)
  • Short user stories: This is key and one of the things that made the most sense to me.
  • Daily scrums: Again, I had tried this but it didn’t work all that well. Turns out it was my fault for lacking focus and goal during those meetings. With what I learned, they will be a productive and informative 15 minutes.

Following that, with each new iteration I’ll try to implement an extra practice or 2.

My biggest problem right now is that my team’s physical setup is very 80′s style with no room for white boards, small cubicles and not much opportunity for open communication. I’ve fought the fight with no results at all (showed my managers this and this, but they don’t agree. Small cubes are fine apparently … anyway, that’s a fight for another day). And don’t think I’m being critical and non constructive. I’ve offered cheep and pragmatic ways to make my team better … but it seems like the economic crunch … well, you know.