I had a chance to try the best-ready test that the Scrum Alliance is going to introduce for CSM classes.

Lot of fun. It took me about 45 minutes, 100 questions. I passed, wheeeee!

My Biased feedback

The questions (from my point of view) can be broken down roughly into the following categories:

• definitive (like rephrased statements from the Agile Manifesto which you should remember);
• quotation-based (you need to remember some of the Ken’s statements to choose the answer);
• quantitative (you need to recall some [weird] numbers appearing in the literature);
• decision-based (case studies, you need to make decisions on behalf of a ScrumMaster);
• provoking (the ones that tend to test whether you really got it or just learned the books).

I really liked two latter ones because what they test is common sense.

Other questions were based on rather 3 Ken’s books and 2 Mike’s books and tend to test whether a candidate read the books and how good his/her memory is. He who did Microsoft exams (MCSD, MCSE) will understand what I mean.

The quantitative questions sounded the most weird to me. Who would know how much time it takes to transition an enterprise to Scrum? There was no such an option as “it depends”, sadly… So I had to pull it from the air (Do we as a community have industry-wide statistics at all? I remember people asked the Scrum Alliance on the conference to provide more stats in future).

In general the test looks OK and (after it is improved) I really look forward for it to be used on the classes. I know some CSMs who barely understand empirical control, how to measure velocity and other important stuff. Are they the ones who are responsible for (what Jeff Sutherland calls) ScrumButts?

My Concerns

• If the test has the hard references from the books, does it mean the class materials should contain the precise answers? Would CSTs find it comfortable? But if this is not going to happen, how would a trainer feels like when his/her candidates fail the test due to not remembering some of the book numbers?

• Will Scrum Alliance ask all current CSMs to re-pass the exam? That would be fun!
• How will a test for Product Owners look like?

Ideas and insights

Brainstorming with some other folks who tried the test brought in some of the following ideas:

• The “in” test
  So far we are going to have the “out” test. But we think having also the “in” test that would indicate weak areas of the candidates would make sense. The test will focus the candidates on learning and help the trainer adapt material accordingly. Also by comparing the “in” and “out” test the candidates can really measure usefulness of the class.
• Estimations, user stories, etc.
  Seems there were lack of questions on estimation techniques, user stories and other Mike’s stuff which the vast majority of Scrum teams find extremely valuable.