Monday, April 07, 2014

My PSM I Experience

I was thinking of taking up the PSM I for quite some time now.. and finally made up my mind to take it last weekend. Once I got the password, looked at various discussions and all were almost chorus in saying that the questions were tricky and you have to carefully read and understand the words that have been used to form the questions to make the right choices.

Here are the steps that I took for a couple days before the assessment

1. Read the Scrum Guide in detail around 3 times, its just 16 pages and you can go through it easily, but try to focus on the philosophy that they are trying to communicate on each read, believe me, you will get something new every time you go through it.

2. Read the Scrum Master Training Manual found at http://mgmtplaza.com/downloads/Scrum%20Training%20Manual.pdf , this manual has a test based on real world scenario and a couple of assessment samples that made me more confident.

3. Took the Scrum.org open assessments several times until I exhausted all the questions in the pool, after about I guess 5th or 6th time, I was able to get all of them correct well within 5 mins.

and.. thats it.

I have experience working in scrum team so it proved to be priceless, but one key thing that I found out was that Scrum has evolved a lot and what you have practiced is no more correct at-least as far the some of the best choice/answers go.

So my past experience made me confused and unsure about some of the choices to make !!!


Coming to the actual assessment... my strategy was to take around 30 sec for each question and try to make it through all 80 in around 40-45 mins with 15 mins to spare to review the ones that I felt needed a review.

I went through all the questions, as I had thought, in about 45 mins bookmarking around 12 of them along the way.
With 15 mins to spare I reviewed them and changed/tweaked around 3 to 4 questions.

According to me, this was the toughest task as changing the earlier instinctively chosen answer is a hard task. If you are not used of doing this you may want to devise your own plan :-).

BTW, there were only around 12 - 15 questions max that were from open assessment in my case.

If I remember correctly as others have said, there were around 3 questions on burndown charts, around 3 to 4 based on the fact that the next sprint starts as soon as the previous one's over.

and at the end I made it through in one go :-)

Scrum On !