Qualified Professional Scrum Master -I

I have since long used Scrum in various forms but never got “certified”. Then I came across http://www.scrum.org/onlinescrumcertification/ and reading through this and its reviews I was really tempted to see how much knowledge I had. I attempted the free Assessment and got only 74% marks (qualifying marks were 85%). Now I knew that I may be distorting Scrum unknowingly and I went through the Scrum Guide seriously and was enlightened in many ways. Took the test almost 10 days later and passed with 91% marks.

So, I am a Professional Scrum Master -I that is good to hear, but in addition I came to know what mistakes I was making in implementing it in our team and coincidentally we are starting a new Sprint on 10Jan2011 and I would ensure that those mistakes are not repeated.

Inducting Interns

We decided to offer three candidates internship. They are all MCA final year students who have 6 months of industrial exposure as part of their curriculum.

I made a decision to ask the current engineering team to select the three individuals from a pool of 13 in a single day. We had an aptitiude test, a simple Java test including a small program writing and a general question paper to judge the clarity of the individual regarding training followed by an interview taken by the three engineering staff.I also sat down with the engineering team to come with a probable plan of study and project that should help them cover the curriculum needs and also know how software development happens in our company.

The three interns joined us on 03Jan2011. If end of 6 months we have any open vacancies should we provide these three individuals a first shot at it? I am not sure, but I think it is better to evaluate a person in 6 months than in 60 minutes. Let us see how it goes. The only thing that I plan to gurantee is that they would have good exposure to working in teams than their colleagues.