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Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer - Featured PST - Simon Bourk, Canada

November 27, 2018

Scrum itself is a simple framework for effective team collaboration on complex products. While it is lightweight and simple to understand, it is difficult to master. In the Scrum.org Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer series, we feature a new Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) each month to answer your most pressing questions regarding the challenges and situations your Scrum Teams are facing. 

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Simon Bourk was live and answered the audience's questions.

The questions asked in this session were:

  • How did you decide to become a Professional Scrum Trainer?
  • What was your experience in becoming a Professional Scrum Trainer and going through that process?
  • Do you have any good advice on how to get your teams working together to create a great Sprint Goal?
  • Is the Scrum Master expected to encourage the Development Team to do Test Driven Development (TDD) and are there any tools that you've used for TDD?
  • Do you have any stories you can share about a time you tried to help a company implement Scrum and they resisted the change? How did you overcome the resistance?
  • Do you need to have a technical or development background to be a good Scrum Master?
  • How do you work with a dedicated UX team if UX needs to be completed and signed off by sponsors before actual development in a Sprint starts?
  • If you have a specialist in your team, if they service multiple Scrum Teams, can they be excused from some Scrum Events?
  • Scrum seems to mostly by applied to programming and coding, can you talk about other industries using Scrum? 
  • Is there an approach for estimating that you recommend?
  • How do you handle getting people to change to an agile forecasting mindset?
  • How do you approach estimation for items that did not get done during the Sprint?
  • Can the Scrum Master and Product Owner be the same person?
  • What do you use to measure value?
  • What are your thoughts on refinement and how do you deal with stories that are too big?
  • How can multiple teams work together to deliver a product?

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