The training was given by our certified ScrumMasters Ravi and Arjun 
on 10th and 11th of May at 14th floor of our Kolkata office. The training started with an introduction given by Sheetal, our HR, as to why we need Scrum training and the importance of training in our professional career.
The opening line of the training conversation was “May be some of you think you know Scrum, but we assure you by the end of the training session you will have a different opinion“.
Our ScrumMasters started with “Introduction to Scrum” discussing about Scrum methodology, where and when of Scrum, Scrum team, Product Owner, ScrumMaster, Scrum terminologies, Scrum Challenges. This gave us? the basic knowledge on Scrum which was interesting and we came to know about few things which we didn’t follow like “Definition of Done” should be visible to the team all the time. We were then asked to form teams of 5. This followed with an interesting event which explained the concept of “velocity” in Scrum. It was getting more and more interesting? as we saw Scrum practice in real(action) and it’s effect to improve performance. Then we had an event on “Definition of Done“.
As the training was event driven it was like play and learn which worked very well. All the teams were now in a positive spirit as everyone was involved and the way each team were working, it looked as if they have been practicing Scrum for quite sometime. Then Scrum meetings, Burndown Charts and Velocity were explained in detail. This was followed by Q&A session and the training halted for the day to be carried forwarded the next day.
During the training we came to know the difference between Product Backlog and Sprint Backlog and full-time ScrumMaster and Partial ScrumMaster.
On 11th May, we started up with event depicting actual scrum with different stories assigned to teams, the Scrum sprint was timeboxed to 20 min, with each day of 4 minutes. We were given 30 seconds for daily standups. we had to choose a ScrumMaster from the team. Ravi and Arjun were the Product Owners explaining us the stories and clarifying our doubts. We even had to update burndown charts after the standups.
After this event all the participants had clear idea how the things work in Scrum. Ravi and Arjun had Sprint review for each of the teams where some stories passed and a few were failed, but yes it was a great experience.
The first few hours of the day flew away with storming speed where all of us were thoroughly involved in this activity based learning.
Post lunch we were given three different scenarios and were asked how the ScrumMaster should react in those scenarios. These were more realistic scenario’s which normally teams face in their sprints. This followed with an exercise showing “Impact of Change” which was a mind twister exercise for everyone and explained us how the teams performance goes down when the projects are switched too often for a team.
Then “Distributed Scrum” concept for having Scrum was explained how multiple teams/distributed teams across the globe work, which was very interesting for us as we did not know much about it. We were explained how to manage dependencies of teams and synchronizing sprints.
Most interesting part of the training was the “Release planning and estimation” session, which was a new concept for most of the participants. We were demonstrated how to go about Release planning and estimation for a project. Individual and collective team thoughts which are given while estimating were explained. Concepts like buffer time limit, testing sprint, release burndown chart used by Product Owners to understand the progress of product development, Product backlog creation, the 3C’s of Scrum, estimation of stories, Poker card methodology were discussed in details.
Then we had an event on “Release planning and estimation“, which was again as interesting as other events and exercise’s we had. This was the last event which concluded with Q&A session.
“We went to training with a mood of learning what we knew and came out of training knowing what all we didn’t knew about Scrum”. Although we have been following SCRUM for the a long time , and our SCRUM practices were good, but after attending the SCRUM training we came to know some of the specific concepts and features in more detail.
It was an excellent experience with “learn while you play” kind of training, which everyone enjoyed. We thank both of our ScrumMasters Arjun and Ravi for their time and effort and enlightening us on the finer prints of Scrum.
Our ScrumMasters proved what they said at the start of the training, “May be some of you think you know Scrum, but we assure you by the end of the training session you will have a different opinion”.
- Dot Net Team – CRRI(Kolkata)
