PSM I study guide

Eighty-five percent.

Twelve wrong answers out of eighty and you have failed. That single number should shape everything about how you prepare, because it is the highest pass mark of any entry-level certification you are likely to sit.

What you are walking into

The economics

• $200 per attempt. No prerequisites, no course required, no expiry on the password once you buy it.
• No free retake unless you attended a Scrum.org class and fail within 14 days of it. Buying a self-study attempt means every failure costs another $200.
• Lifetime certification. No renewal, no fee, no PDUs. Pay once, hold it forever. This is the single biggest advantage over the CSM route.
• Retake whenever you like. No waiting period, just another $200.
• Results are immediate, with a breakdown by competency so you can see exactly where you leaked marks.

The order that works

• Read the 2020 Scrum Guide end to end. It is around fourteen pages. Read it before you touch any prep material, including this one.
• Read it again, slowly, with a pen. Every sentence in it is examinable. It is the shortest source document of any major certification and every word was fought over.
• Then work through the competencies here, which is where the Guide's terse sentences get unpacked into what questions actually ask.
• Drill the free Scrum Open on scrum.org until you score 100% repeatedly and quickly. Not once. Repeatedly.
• Then timed practice. The pass mark is unforgiving and the clock is the second examiner.
• Read the Guide a third time the day before. People who do this report the sentences reading differently once they know what is being asked.

Your study plan

What the exam is made of.

Scrum.org maps every PSM I question to one of three Professional Scrum Competencies. Unlike PMI, it does not tell you how the marks are distributed between them.

The three competencies

The format

The source document, and the impostor

The Guide, not your job.

Almost everyone who fails PSM I fails for one of two reasons. They answered from their workplace instead of from the Guide, or they missed a single word in the question.

The rules

Swap the instinct for the answer

Eliminating options mechanically

• Kill anything that names a practice the Guide does not contain. Velocity, story points, burndown, Sprint zero.
• Kill anything where the Scrum Master exercises authority over people or technical decisions.
• Kill anything that reduces transparency or defers an inspection.
• Kill anything that changes the Sprint length mid-flight, or extends it.
• Prefer the answer that returns the decision to the people doing the work.
• Watch for questions with only one attractive option and three obviously wrong ones. Those exist, and they are free marks. Take them quickly and bank the time for the genuinely close pairs.

The Scrum framework.

The largest competency in practice, because most questions on this exam eventually reduce to whether you know how the framework fits together.

Empiricism and lean thinking

The five Scrum Values

The Scrum Team

• One team, no sub-teams, no hierarchies. The 2020 Guide removed the idea of a separate Development Team inside the Scrum Team, precisely to kill the "us and them" dynamic between Product Owner and Developers.
• Typically ten or fewer people. The Guide says smaller teams communicate better and are more productive. If a team grows too large, consider reorganizing into multiple Scrum Teams sharing one Product Goal, one Product Backlog and one Product Owner.
• Cross-functional, meaning collectively they have every skill needed to create value each Sprint.
• Self-managing, meaning they decide who does what, how, and what to work on. This is a change from 2017's "self-organizing", which covered only who and how.
• Three accountabilities, not roles: Product Owner, Scrum Master, Developers. The word "role" is outdated vocabulary.
• The whole Scrum Team is accountable for creating a valuable, useful Increment every Sprint.

The events

Artifacts and their commitments

• Product Backlog: an emergent, ordered list of what is needed to improve the product. The single source of work. Ordered by the Product Owner.
• Sprint Backlog: the Sprint Goal, the selected items, and the plan for delivering them. By and for the Developers. Updated throughout the Sprint as more is learned. A highly visible, real-time picture.
• Increment: a concrete stepping stone toward the Product Goal, additive to all prior Increments and verified to work together. Multiple Increments may be created in a single Sprint. An Increment may be delivered before the Sprint ends; the Review is not a release gate.

Definition of Done

• A formal description of the state of the Increment when it meets the required quality measures.
• Applies to every item, not per item, and creates a shared understanding of what "done" means.
• If an item does not meet it, it is not released and not presented at the Review. It returns to the Product Backlog for future consideration.
• If the organization has a Definition of Done, it is a minimum the Scrum Team must follow. The team may make it stricter, never looser.
• If the organization has none, the Scrum Team creates one appropriate to the product.
• Multiple Scrum Teams on one product must mutually define and comply with the same Definition of Done.
• The Developers are accountable for instilling quality by adhering to it.

Developing people and teams.

The competency candidates consistently score worst on. It is where the Scrum Master's actual job lives, and where the gap between how your organization behaves and how the Guide describes it is widest.

What a Scrum Master actually is

What a Scrum Master is not

• Not a manager. No authority to hire, fire, appraise, or direct.
• Not a secretary. Does not take notes at the Daily Scrum, update the board on the team's behalf, or write status reports about the team.
• Not a gatekeeper. Does not stand between stakeholders and the team. Removes barriers between them.
• Not required at the Daily Scrum. Ensures it happens; the Developers own it.
• Not an estimator. The Developers size the work.
• Not the decider on technical approach, task allocation, or backlog order.

Self-management

• The Scrum Team internally decides who does the work, how it is done, and what is worked on. The 2020 Guide widened this from the 2017 wording, which covered only who and how.
• Nobody outside the team tells the Developers how to turn Product Backlog items into Increments.
• Self-management is a capability that gets coached into existence, not a switch. A new team needs more from a Scrum Master, not less.
• When a team asks the Scrum Master to make their decision, the coaching answer is to help them make it, not to make it.

Facilitation

• Events must be positive, productive, and within the timebox. That triple is the Scrum Master's standard.
• Facilitating does not mean chairing. It means creating conditions where the right conversation happens.
• A silent team member, a dominant voice, a Review that has become a demo theater: all facilitation problems, all the Scrum Master's business.
• The Scrum Master may facilitate any event but only owns ensuring they occur and are effective.

Coaching and conflict

• Coach the team toward self-management, cross-functionality, and higher effectiveness.
• Conflict is normal. The Scrum Master helps the team address it themselves rather than arbitrating.
• The Retrospective is the built-in forum for team dysfunction. If a question describes a recurring people problem, the Retrospective is often the right venue.
• Teaching, mentoring, coaching and facilitating are different things. Teaching gives knowledge; coaching draws it out. Exam options sometimes hinge on which the situation calls for.
• Psychological safety is the precondition for openness and courage. Without it, transparency is theater.

Managing products with agility.

The Product Owner's world, examined from the Scrum Master's chair. You are not tested on being a Product Owner. You are tested on knowing what theirs is, so you can protect it.

Product, and Product Goal

• A product is a vehicle to deliver value, with a clear boundary, known stakeholders, and well-defined users or customers.
• The Product Goal is the long-term objective for the Scrum Team and the commitment attached to the Product Backlog. It is the target the team plans against.
• One Product Goal at a time. The team must fulfill or abandon one before starting the next.
• The Product Backlog is emergent: it defines what will improve the product and is never complete.

Product Backlog management

• The Product Owner orders it. They may take input from anyone, and the organization must respect their decisions. Nobody may force the Developers to work from a different set of requirements.
• Refinement breaks items down and adds detail: description, order, size. An ongoing activity, not an event. How it is done is up to the Scrum Team.
• The Developers size the work. The Product Owner may influence by helping them understand trade-offs, but the people doing the work do the sizing.
• Items that can be Done within one Sprint are deemed ready for selection at Sprint Planning. Scrum does not define a formal Definition of Ready; that is common practice, not framework.
• Multiple Scrum Teams on one product share one Product Backlog, one Product Owner, one Product Goal.

Value and stakeholders

• The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the team's work.
• The Sprint Review is the formal place for stakeholder collaboration. It is a working session where attendees discuss what changed in the environment and what to do next.
• The Scrum Master removes barriers between stakeholders and the team, rather than acting as a proxy.
• Stakeholders are invited to the Review by the Product Owner. They do not attend the Retrospective.

Forecasting and release planning

• The Sprint Backlog is a forecast, not a commitment. The Sprint Goal is the commitment. Items may be added, dropped or renegotiated with the Product Owner as learning happens, provided the Sprint Goal is not endangered.
• Progress toward a goal is inspected at least at the relevant event. Empirical data beats projection.
• The Increment may be released whenever the Product Owner decides. The Sprint Review is not a release gate and releasing does not have to wait for the Sprint to end.
• If the Sprint Goal becomes obsolete, the Product Owner may cancel the Sprint.
• Scrum does not define release planning as an event. Whatever the team does about it is a practice they chose.

Scaling, lightly

Wording traps.

The exam is short, the Guide is shorter, and the pass mark is 85%. There is nowhere to hide, so the difficulty lives almost entirely in precision. These are the specific places people lose marks.

Vocabulary that dates you

Things that sound like Scrum and are not

• Sprint zero. Does not exist. Every Sprint produces a valuable Increment.
• Hardening or release Sprints. Do not exist. Quality is instilled every Sprint via the Definition of Done.
• Velocity and story points. Not in the Guide. Common practice.
• Burndown and burnup charts. Not in the Guide.
• Planning poker. Not in the Guide.
• User stories. Not in the Guide. The Guide says Product Backlog item.
• Definition of Ready. Not in the Guide, though the concept of items being ready for selection is.
• Scrum of Scrums, Nexus, SAFe, LeSS. Separate frameworks or practices. Not PSM I material.
• The Scrum Master as a full-time job. The Guide is silent, so any option asserting it is wrong.

Pairs the exam loves to swap

The endgame

• Score 100% on the Scrum Open, repeatedly and fast. Not once, and not slowly. It is easier than the real thing, so anything under 100% means you are not close.
• Practice timed. Sixty minutes for eighty questions is the second examiner. Untimed practice tells you very little.
• Never leave a blank. There is no penalty for guessing.
• Flag and move. Anything over about a minute gets flagged and left.
• Re-read the Guide the day before. It takes under an hour and the sentences read differently once you know what is being asked of them.

Glossary.

Terms as the 2020 Scrum Guide uses them. Where a common industry word is absent from the Guide, that absence is noted, because the absence is examinable.

PSM I exam questions, answered