Ken and Anthony
Last weekend had some of the most glorious winter days I have ever seen in Seattle and rather than enjoy myself outside looking around, I chose to spend it with Ken Schwaber. Ken is a very well-known industry figure and one of the founders of Scrum. He has recently founded Scrum.org to allow him to further pursue his goals and vision for helping advance the adoption and use of Scrum.
His new venture, Scrum.org takes him down the path of having new courses, new assessments and new certifications. It is the assessment-based certification that largely differentiates Scrum.org from some of Ken’s previous endeavours.
A few years back, I attended a Certified ScrumMaster course. It cost me somewhere between $1K and $2K and after spending two days in the classroom I was magically endowed with the the title Certified ScrumMaster or CSM for short. The certifications from Scrum.org are quite different in that they require you to do an online assessment and achieve over a certain result to gain the certification. Attending the course, Scrum-in-Depth, will certainly assist you in passing the exam (Professional ScrumMaster I), but just attending the course does not in itself give you a certification. Professional ScrumMaster II is the next level up and it promises to be quite a tough and challenging certification. Initial estimates suggest as few as 20 people will achieve the required grade to attain this certification during 2010.
One of the most exciting things that Scrum.org is delivering this year is an assessment-based certification called Professional Scrum Developer (.NET). This certification is designed to show that a certified individual not only understands Scrum but has the practical knowledge to use Scrum in their everyday projects. In preparation for the exam, you can attend a new course called the Scrum Developer training. This has been developed by Richard Hundhausen from Accentient and is a five day course that covers Scrum but in the context of teams using Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010. During the course you work in teams and complete four or five sprints where you have to produce a potentially shippable increment of value. The lessons learnt on the course are fantastic and give you the skills and knowledge to greatly improve the likelihood that your adoption and use of Scrum will be successful.
So back to my purpose in spending the last weekend with Ken.
Over the weekend Ken delivered the Scrum-in-Depth course on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond. This is a prerequisite for someone wanting to become a Scrum Developer Trainer. I have already completed the Scrum Developer course and the assessments and this was one of the final steps towards my accreditation to deliver the course. If you’re in Australia and interested in attending this exciting new five-day course, I will be offering it as part of the post-conference training for the inaugural Australian ALM Conference. The course is a public course and you don’t have to attend the conference to sign up for the training.
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