How I became a certified Scrum-master in two days...

I'll asume that most readers are somewhat familiar with Agile methodologies. Scrum is one of these, as is eXtreme Programming and Crystal. It is a framework that avoids taking too much control over how you do projects, but adding a few core ideas and rituals that could be of use to any kind organization. If you aren't familiar with Scrum or any other agile method, read up on it now. Here's enough to get you started :

Scrum Alliance's intro

Now, for us that have the privilege of working in a company that can see the long-term benefits of spending a decent fortune sending you off on a two-day course, we kickstarted our Scrum-ways by doing Jens Østergaard's course for becoming certified Scrum-masters (cool title, eh?). It is not an expensive course by itself, but it costs the company alot to take us all of our projects for a whole day (the course was friday and saturday).

Before the course, I honestly figured I knew enough of Scrum to do fine without it, but it would be nice to have the title, and maybe widen horizons a bit.

I'm not going to go through the content of the course, but I can tell you that Jens is an excellent presenter, I learned some Scrum basics I've missed along the way (especially about project roles). I learned a few wise steps to take for introducing Scrum into a project or organization.

I would definitely recommend the course for people who want an introduction to Scrum, and also people who are going to "sell Scrum", meaning getting their customers to accept it instead of horrible traditional project plans. You can read/practice yourself up to the same knowledge (after all, Scrum principles are easy, and mostly it is about using common sense), but this course was a nice compressed version for those who do not have time/resources to educate themselves into Scrummers.

Funny how many of those Agile web-sites seem to be powered by Rails Studio. Pretty clear that the Ruby on Rails community seems fairly connected to the Scrum one. Noticed all those nice urls ;)

One of those little funny coincidences of life; this is a graph over last weeks visits (RSS hits excluded). Look familiar?

But honestly, I can't write any more. Still recovering from yesterday's St. Patrick's Day celebrations.

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