The ScrumMaster Study Guide

Examining the questions most commonly asked by students attending Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) classes, The ScrumMaster Study Guide provides an accessible introduction to the concepts of Scrum and agile development. It compiles the insights gained by the author in teaching more than 100 CSM classes and countless seminars.

Describing how to sell agile development to upper management and customers, the book illustrates real-world implementation of agile development, addressing the roles and responsibilities of each team member as well as some of the things that can go wrong in an implementation.

• Focuses on running Scrum projects in an agile environment
• Covers agile development, team building, and transitioning to Scrum and agile
• Explains how to adapt Scrum and agile to your work environment
• Describes how to measure individual and team productivity
• Illustrates the functions of a Scrum team on a day-to-day basis

This book is intended for newly minted ScrumMasters, product owners, and students about to attend a CSM or CSPO class as well as developers and managers who want to sharpen their skills. Scrum is a simple framework and agile development is simply a concept; successful implementation requires more than just the training you can get in a CSM class or a workshop. Helping you understand key aspects of agile development and Scrum that might have previously been difficult to comprehend, this book is the ideal starting point for finding the answers you need for agile software development in your organization.

About the Author

Jim Schiel has over 28 years of experience in software development, research-and-development (R&D) management, agile development, and Scrum in highly regulated industries. He has been a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) since 2005 and a Certified Scrum Professional (CSP) and Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) since 2006.

Jim’s career started in 1985 when he began working for Siemens Medical Solutions. He managed various development teams, ranging in size from 5 to 80 developers; he instituted iterative project management processes. At Siemens, Jim transitioned an organization of 1,200 developers from waterfall and various iterative models to agile development using Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) concepts. Jim left Siemens in 2008 to begin working as an agile coach and trainer and in 2009 founded Artisan Software Consulting. Artisan provides coaching, training, and consulting to organizations attempting large-scale transitions to agile development using lean software development principles, Scrum, XP, and kanban approaches.

Jim has been training for over 7 years and has trained more than 1,100 students. He currently teaches Certified ScrumMaster courses and Certified Scrum Product Owner courses and provides workshops on advanced Scrum techniques, user stories, agile in management, and more. Jim’s book, Enterprise-Scale Agile Software Development, published in 2010 by CRC Press, covers much of his experiences managing and guiding large-scale transformations.