Complete Scrum Master course - Preparatory for PSM I exam

Clarifies big A agile versus small a, framing agile as a mindset for empirical, iterative development that delivers value through feedback and adaptation, with frameworks like Scrum and Kanban.

The agile manifesto, created in 2001 by 17 practitioners in Utah, outlines four values and twelve principles for agile development, prioritizing individuals, working software, customer collaboration, and change over processes.

Explore the 12 agile principles that complement the manifesto and are addressed in Scrum roles, events, and processes.

Compare predictive, adaptive, and hybrid project management, outlining planning, execution, and delivery; emphasize adaptive Scrum practices with product backlog, sprints, and increments to deliver value.

Explore the iron triangle, mastering how scope, time, and resources drive project outcomes in waterfall and agile, including timebox, fixed duration, and fixed resource constraints.

Compare predictive and adaptive approaches to project management, explaining how well-defined scope favors predictive, while adaptive enables iterative, incremental delivery with active user involvement.

The cone of uncertainty shows estimates tighten as details emerge, from 60–160% to 83–120% to 90–110%, with agile feedback reducing backlog variation and prioritizing the most important features first.

Emphasizes agile development as an iterative, incremental process with cross-functional, self-managed teams that inspect work frequently and deliver value by turning product backlog items into releasable increments.

Embrace agile's core principles, adopting five main principles: shippable product increments of functional working software, receive and give feedback, frequent delivery, and continuous improvement through regular reviews and customer feedback.

Develop agile proficiency by embracing iterative and incremental development, with self-managed cross-functional teams that transform backlog items into releasable increments, while users inspect artifacts toward sprint goal to maximize value.

Explore why to adopt agile and scrum, addressing common project pains and showing how daily scrums, continuous integration, and self-organized teams boost productivity, time to market, and stakeholder satisfaction.

Scrum is a lightweight framework for complex adaptive problems, with cross-functional teams delivering high value in one-to-four week sprints, enabling fast feedback and rapid adaptation.

Learn the three pillars of Scrum: transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Understand how shared information, ongoing checks, and responsive adjustments drive continuous improvement in agile projects.

Learn how to uphold the Scrum values of courage, focus, commitment, respect, and openness to drive effective teamwork and project delivery across the Scrum team.

Adopting scrum speeds innovation, delivering increments quickly and enabling fast feedback to re-prioritize. It boosts quality and customer satisfaction through close collaboration, aligns business and IT, and lifts team morale.

Learn how the Scrum framework coordinates five events—sprint, sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, retrospective—along with roles and artifacts (product backlog, sprint backlog, increment) to deliver a shippable product increment.

Prioritize a co-located workspace to foster osmotic communication and direct face-to-face interaction across Scrum events, while distributed teams rely on robust tools to keep everyone informed.

Define scrum team as product owner, the scrum master, and developers. Establish three accountabilities for the team: developers, product owner, and scrum master; stakeholders are not part of the team.

See how the scrum master, a servant leader, coaches the team, removes impediments, and facilitates events to implement the scrum process in the Ice Cream project.

Promote the scrum framework across the team, removing obstacles and enabling lean, agile delivery. Exert indirect process authority as a servant leader and support the product owner.

The Scrum Master serves the product owner and development team by facilitating product backlog management, clarifying backlog items, and maximizing value through agile planning and empirical practices.

The Scrum master acts as a servant leader for the team, coaching developers in self-management and cross-functionality. They remove impediments and facilitate events as needed, helping the organization spread Scrum.

Lead the change across the organization by training stakeholders, planning the adoption of the scrum framework, and aligning product owners, development teams, and other scrum masters to boost productivity.

Learn to be a responsible, humble, and collaborative scrum master who guides the team through commitment and influence. Drive open discussion, resolve impediments, and keep growing with Scrum knowledge.

Maximize product value by acting as the single product owner responsible for the backlog, prioritizing items, and serving as the main liaison between customers and developers.

Select one product owner per project who maximizes product value, defines the vision and backlog, and ensures visibility, clarity, stakeholder communication, and decisive, empowered leadership.

Developers are cross-functional, self-organizing experts who move items from the product backlog to the sprint backlog. The whole team is accountable for each task, with no single owner.

Select developers per the Scrum guide, ensure a self-managed, cross-functional development team of 3–9 members that collaboratively turns the product backlog into a releasable increment.

Scrum has no project manager role. Developers self-manage while the Scrum Master ensures framework adoption and the Product Owner manages the backlog and interfaces with users.

Discover the five scrum events, including the sprint, sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective. Ensure time boxed durations guide delivery and improvement.

Learn how a sprint works, including the sprint backlog, daily scrum, and delivering a potentially releasable increment within a timebox of one week to four weeks.

Developers lead sprint planning to select high-priority product backlog items for the sprint backlog, set a sprint goal, and outline tasks, with the product owner clarifying item meanings.

The daily scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed stand-up. Developers share progress, plan the next 24 hours, and surface impediments under the scrum master's guidance.

The sprint review presents the increment to stakeholders, with the entire scrum team presenting work, and ensures only items that meet definition of done are shown; unfinished items go back.

Inspect the sprint through the retrospective to review activities, the process, and the definition of done, and identify improvements for the next sprint.

Agile testing runs automated tests after iteration to identify defects earlier, ensure definition of done is met, and handle escaped defects by reintroducing fixes into product backlog and sprint backlog.

Explore the three official Scrum artifacts—the product backlog, the sprint backlog, and the increment—and examine the definition of done along with project and sprint progress measurements.

Explore how the product backlog functions as the primary, dynamic artifact in Scrum, organized by value and clarity, with items like user stories decomposed for sprint work.

Refine the product backlog as a live list through ongoing refinement, aligning items with priorities, sizes, and sprint readiness, while adding or removing user stories and reassessing estimates.

Explore user stories as building blocks of product and sprint backlogs, using the 'as a user, I want to' template, with conditions of success, value, effort, and definition of done.

Apply the invest criteria to write independent, negotiable, valuable, and testable user stories that fit a sprint. Explore epic, themes, APKs, and backlog refinement to split work for delivery.

Define the sprint backlog as the team's to-do list for the sprint, derived from the product backlog during sprint planning, detailing user stories and tasks across design, development, and testing.

Learn how the increment aggregates completed, releasable sprint backlog items at the end of each sprint, with dynamic product backlog changes and cross-team integration.

Define the definition of done and document the minimum criteria—such as past functional and unit tests, no defects, peer code review, and performance tests—that determine when an increment is releasable.

Define the definition of ready as backlog items small enough for a sprint, with clear acceptance criteria and invest criteria, clarified during backlog refinement and confirmed by the product owner.

Explore the planning onion that reveals all levels of agile planning, from strategy and portfolio planning to the product backlog, release plans, and sprint planning, daily scrum, and iterations.

Explore estimation techniques in scrum, including story points, velocity, ideal hours, and planning poker, to measure agile work and plan sprints effectively.

Learn how story points measure relative effort and complexity for backlog items, why they use relative estimates over hours, and how planning poker and velocity guide agile estimation.

Learn how velocity measures the amount of work completed in a sprint by summing story point estimates, and how to forecast completion dates using velocity while recognizing its limitations.

Estimate agile effort with ideal time, defined as work completed without interruptions in ideal hours or days. Compare ideal time to elapsed time, and note the scrum master prevents interruptions.

Learn planning poker, an agile estimation method using consensus, face-down card reveals, and Fibonacci numbers or t-shirt sizes to estimate user stories and fit sprint capacity.

Triangulation uses two reference stories from planning poker to estimate other user stories by proximity of points, with discussions with developers and the CEO to choose the best value.

Estimate across portfolio, product, and sprint backlogs using t-shirt sizes and story points to forecast time, effort, and value. The product owner ranks items by value using roi and npv.

Define and communicate a high level product roadmap that aligns vision, strategy, and delivery over time, guiding agile decisions and stakeholder alignment, using methods like roadmaps, Kanban, or Gantt charts.

Prioritize simple, face-to-face communication in agile projects to enable daily collaboration between business and developers. Reflect regularly to improve processes and keep communication simple as a Scrum master.

Use information radiators to display project progress with visual reports like big visible charts or kanban boards; keep them updated and accessible to all stakeholders.

Discover how the scrum task board visualizes sprint backlog progress using columns from to do to done, tracks resources, and flags impediments or bottlenecks.

Use the burndown chart to visualize remaining story points over time, compare actual progress to the planned line, and assess ahead or behind schedule to adjust the sprint.

Understand how a burn-up chart tracks completed work against total scope for a sprint, unlike burn-down charts, and shows scope changes as the blue line meets the green line.

Use the Niko-Niko calendar to monitor daily team mood and satisfaction, providing the Scrum Master with a morale report. Track happiness to spot conflicts early and keep the team motivated.

Explore how to adapt Scrum using ADAPT model: awareness, desire, ability, promotion, and transfer, across organizational, group, and individual levels. Decide where to apply ADAPT and translate results across teams.

Identify why awareness of the need for change emerges, including denial, fear, and overwhelming progress, then apply tools like communicating problems, metrics, pilot project, and focused reasons to drive change.

Spark the desire to change by communicating a better scrum approach and creating urgency. Employ a three-month test drive with aligned incentives to build team momentum.

Develop the ability to adopt Scrum by coaching, training, spreading the Scrum principles, fostering shared responsibility, and practicing continuous improvement through action and realistic targets.

Consolidate Scrum foundations, reinforce agile behavior across teams, and promote real results through stories and agile safari experiences, avoiding marketing hype by framing it as a change.

Transfer Scrum implications to other departments to sustain organizational agility. Apply the adapt cycle to grow Scrum maturity across finance, marketing, HR, and IT operations.

Develop and sustain agile culture by following the adapt cycle: awareness to desire to ability, with teams adopting Scrum, sharing successes, and continuously planning, testing, and improving.

Learn how a dynamic improvement backlog drives scrum enhancement, from building awareness to developing the ability to run scrum well, with clear responsibilities and item-focused observation updates.

Explore strategies for adopting scrum, from starting small or going all in, to public or stealth transitions, with considerations of cost, risk, resistance, and organizational readiness.

Discover why fixed price contracts clash with agile principles and how time and material contracts, with allocated man hours per sprint, better align with evolving product scope in Scrum projects.

scaling scrum involves managing a large, distributed project with one product backlog, multiple teams, and area backlogs, while maintaining strong teams of up to nine members.

Manage a single product backlog in a scaled environment, keeping it to 100–150 items. Use apps and themes for lower items and align two teams with word and excel visions.

Disseminate scrum across the organization by applying strategies to form and train new teams, including split and seed, grow and split, and internal coach to transfer knowledge.

Learn how scaling scrum keeps roles clear: one scrum master and one product owner per team, with all developers under single guidance, and one project at a time.

Explore how the scrum of scrums uses the same artifacts as Scrum—product backlog, sprint backlog, definition of done, and velocity—and maintain one product backlog with per-team sprint backlogs.

Direct a scrum of scrums by having one representative from each team, typically a developer, to discuss integration, dependencies, and cross-team impediments.

Learn LeSS large-scale scrum, a scaling approach where multiple teams work in the same sprint on the same product, using the same events, rules, and artifacts.

Explore safe, the scaled Agile framework used by enterprises to scale Scrum across portfolios, value streams, and release trains, including layers, epics, backlogs, and PI planning.