I just took and passed the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master (PSM) I exam located at https://www.scrum.org/Assessments/Professional-Scrum-Master-Assessments/PSM-I-Assessment
My Agile background:
- I had only been on one Agile team in my career for the 2 months prior to taking the exam.
- I have read the The Agile Samurai by Jonathan Rasmusson as part of an HMB book club years ago (not sure how much that helped for this exam).
My preparation (a couple days...):
- Read both of these in entirety (both are free and only about 20 pages)
- The Scrum Master Training Manual https://amzn.com/B00V6468AU
- The official Scrum Guide: http://www.scrumguides.org/
- Take the practice exam: https://www.scrum.org/Assessments/Open-Assessments
About the test:
- 80 questions, 60 minutes - I was a little distracted when I took it at the office, but I took the entire 60 minutes down to the last few seconds and didn't have time to review my bookmarked questions. Make sure you have a solid hour blocked off free from distractions
- Several questions from the practice exam are literally copy pasted into the real exam so the practice is very helpful, but not all inclusive
- It is online and not proctored, so I recommend having both the training manual and the scrum guide PDF's open so you can CTRL-F stuff as you go. This helps, but some answers are not straight out of either reference and require you to apply/expand some of your knowledge of the principles of Scrum to answer them
Other tips:
- Don't spend too much time on one question, bookmark it and move on if you're stuck. You can miss 12 questions and still pass, so make sure you leave enough time to get through them all with some thought. You can go back to bookmarked questions at the end if you have time.
- Know:
- The time boxes for different events, there is probably a question on the time box for each event
- The definition of scrum
- What the empirical process is
- Responsibilities of each team member in detail, this is where you'll have to think on some questions
- what is the scrum masters job in the stand ups vs the dev team?
- does the product owner talk with stakeholders or the scrum master?, etc
- What does self-organizing/cross-functional mean?
- What happens in each of the different Scrum events? Who attends them?
- How do multi-team scrums work? How many scrum masters are there? How many product owners? How many product back logs? How many Sprint back logs? How do teams merge their iterations? these were all on the exam and are not directly addressed in the reading material, so some external research would be handy on this...