Certified Scrum Professional Developer (PSD I)

Professional Scrum Developer IHooray! Today I passed the PSD I exam with 2 errors out of 80 (97,5% score)!
I got the oppertunity to take the course and exam and my company and that triggered me to go ahead with it. No real revelations were discovered during this course but I like how I now have the basic Scrum know-how and got to see the developer intake on the process.
In this post I’ll show you how I prepared for the exam, some perspective on it and a couple of facts that do not appear clear on the official Scrum website.

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So here’s a rundown on how I prepared for the PSD I exam:

  • A PSD course consisting out of 4 evenings, 4hour course after work with theory and micro scrum practice projects
  • About ~6 hours of reading
    • Scrum Guide
    • Professional Scrum Developer Glossary
    • Scrum Glossary
    • Scanning recommended readings:
      • Clean Code (the videos are epic btw!)
      • Scrum and XP from the trenches
      • Software in 30 days
      • Nexus Guide
  • Practicing
    • Scrum Master Open exam
    • Scrum Developer Open exam
    • Product Owner Open exam

My end conclusion on the course and exam: It’s more then just theoretics. And that’s a thing I liked about it .
It’s about knowing and understanding the fundamentals of SCRUM and the know-how and expertise of a seasoned developer and the kind of tools and automatisation of the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) proces.
The materie won’t  go into WHAT tools to use or how you should configure stuff but it will cover topics about how scrum works the best using the maximised effort of enforcing a development and delivery proces that will optimise the development time during sprints and creating shippable increments in each sprint.

The catches of the exam are not really shocking: the exam is about understanding what the scrum vision is and keeping that as the core mindset at all times. Whenever you doubt a question – that is not about the stuff you can learn in the guide one on one – you need to think: what position does Scrum take in this matter? Or: how would Scrum be best serviced in this.

Some facts about the exam:

  • a few questions felt like trick questions since they contain a catch that is quickly overlooked when hurrying over the questions
  • You can fill in the answer, mark questions which you like to review and navigate back and front during the exam.
  • 80 questions, 60 minutes and you need a scoring percentage of 85% (12 mistakes max)
  • I marked about 5 questions after filling out all 80. About 2 were changed the rest stayed as-is
  • You get to see what the scoring percentage of the topics/areas is, you cannot see what you did wrong and what the correct answer was.. use the open assessments for that.

Hope you got something out of my take and facts. Cheers