Wow... I have become Certified Scrum Master

Dan Rawsthorne conducted the course on "Scrum Master Certification" @CSC office, Raheja Mind Space, Hi-tech city, Hyderabad on 26^th & 27^th of August 2010. We were around 20 people, mostly from CSC India. It was fun and also learned a lot on both Agile and Scrum way of working.  We have been working on agile process for our product development at Collabnet for the past 1.5 years, I knew many of the concepts which we discussed during our training sessions. It was fun and exiting. We had a group of 4 or 5 people to form a team and went through the practical sessions on the adapting to scrum process. Mainly the practical session covering the iterative development, sprint planning meetings, daily scrums, sprint reviews, sprint retrospective and at the end bringing the product in shape.

We also had a great session discussing on the fixed price contracting projects using Scrum on the second day, which lot CSC folks were looking forward to implement on their projects.

Finally I can call myself as "SCRUM MASTER" HEY....HEY…I am just excited about this.

Scrum Master Responsibilities

I was playing a role of a Scrum Master and I thought of writing up what i have learned so for.

As a scrum master I have asked a question many times (even by myself) to provide a clear picture of what a Scrum Master really does. To help myself and others, I have started writing down the responsibilities of the Scrum Master.

1. As a Scrum Master he/she must make sure Scrum process is followed

2. Scrum Master should help to organize meetings (i.e. stand up meetings, scrum of scrum meetings)

3. Scrum Master should be full time facilitator for the team

4. Scrum Master should enforce time box

5. Scrum Master should make sure back log items for the upcoming sprint are prioritized by the product owner and ready for the sprint planning meeting.

6. Scrum Master should help the team to focus on current sprint to achieve the sprint goals

7. Scrum Master should make every effort to develop a team into high performance team

8. Scrum Master should encourage team members to be self-organized

9. Scrum Maser should support team building/team development by utilizing the abilities and skills of individuals, and developing a feedback culture

10. Scrum Master addresses team needs efficiently and effectively

11. Scrum Master has to work with the team/organization to solve impediments

12. Scrum Master should work with product owner and make sure the team has the cross functional team members (i.e. development, testing, UI designer, documentation)

13. Scrum Master has to identify the solve the hidden problems with the team members

14. Scrum Master has to educate and focus the team towards business driven development

15. Scrum Master has to make sure the feedback given during the sprint review meetings are captured by the team members and help the team members to learn from the experiences