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Clarification required on a few Scrum practices/theory

Last post 02:21 am April 24, 2016 by Chandini Paterson
3 replies
04:06 am April 11, 2016

Hi all,
I'm hoping to take the Scrum PSM I exam shortly. I have been reading up on the Scrum Guide and have a few questions that need clarification for me to understand them correctly.

The guide says that
a) the Scrum Master helps the development team create high-value products. How exactly does he/she do this? Can somebody give me an example please?
b) Understanding product planning in an empirical environment. Would somebody elaborate on this? Or guide me to a link which does?
c) Only members of the Development team create the increment. However, am I correct that the increment belongs (ie is owned by) to the whole team + stakeholders?
d) I saw a question in the Open Assessment about the Scrum master facilitating the Development Teams' decisions. My understanding is that nobody told the team how to do the work. So what would this statement mean? What would 'facilitating' actually mean in this context? What kind of decisions is this talking about?

Thank you,
Chandini




04:44 pm April 21, 2016

a) The Scurm Master helps the Development team members in many different ways.By Facilitating Scrum Events, the Scrum Master ensure transparency. He also helps the team into the Sel-organization Path. One of the more complicated tasks of the Scrum Master is helping the Scrum team to inspect and adapt his practices, never give-up on improvement. For instance, he could discuss the topic of backlog refinement and help the Scrum Team to find a way to go deeper on certain PBI. There is a lot of possibilities to help the team to build High-Value products, and that begin by giving more time on high value task and try to automate the others. You should read some articles about Continuous Learning and DevOps;-)

b)The Scrum Master has to help the Product Owner about the way the Development Team work. Empiricism is based on what you know, so a way to use it is to project the velocity in order to know what the PO could embed into the next Release. It gives an idea. In a Mike Cohn books, it is written that give a clearer vision "a good way is to use the velocity of the most recent iteration, the average of the previous eight iterations, and the average of the previous eight iteration. These three values present a good picture of what just happened, a log-term average, and a worst case of what could happened." This is a way to do it empirically

c) Who can alter the product? The Product Owner responsibility is to manage the Product Backlog, and by extension managing the product. The product evolves and is temporarily represented by the increment (sum of all the work of the previous sprint). What do you think about it?

d) Facilitating Scrum Events and give orders are two different things. An example is the Daily Scrum where the Scrum Master has no need to be there, but ensure that the Development Team has the meeting and within the 15-minute time-box. If you want to go further you have a very good article of Barry Overeem about the Scrum Master as a Facilitator.

A lot of articles are available on the scrum blog with talented PST sharing their experience and it's free.

Have a nice day


12:48 pm April 22, 2016

Please read some of the books suggested before taking the exam. These will help you with truly understanding the concepts, roles, responsibilities, principles and practices

https://www.scrum.org/Courses/Professional-Scrum-Master/PSM-Subject-Are…


02:21 am April 24, 2016

Thank you for your detailed answer and for the reference books. Will look them up.


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