Agile & Scrum foundations training

Last week we completed another Agile & Scrum foundations training @EPAM Bulgaria. It’s been very intense and at the same time quite pleasant to train the wonderful group of young and hungry (for knowledge) developers at the company. 

Agile and Scrum foundations is training I have been conducting for years. The goal is to fully prepare any team or team members to start doing efficient Scrum and adopt the Agile values and mindset. It covers the following topics:

Agile mindset & values

Introducing Agile thinking and mindset is the most important topic. The idea is not only to help people understand the Agile way of thinking and doing, but also to test if it fits the personality of each participant.

Basics of Scrum, benefits of Scrum and the Scrum team

We talk about Scrum from a high-level point of view, discuss why we use the framework, and what the roles in the Scrum team are. It is followed by a game of Scrum roles. 

User stories & backlog refinement
How to write good user stories and how to initially refine the backlog is covered in the session.

Agile metrics and planning poker

I teach the secrets of relative estimation and we play a game of planning poker.

Scrum events, Scrum artifacts & tools, Kanban

We dig deeper into the Scrum events, artifacts and tools, discuss the basics of Kanban and how it could help the team.

Sprint simulator

A turn-based game, simulating a sprint for the participants to experience it in fast-forward environment.

There are also sessions about XP, retrospective game, and Agile & Scrum test so everybody could check what they learned and how to implement it in their work.

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Some of the participants feedback:

What was good?

- Short sessions. Well-structured and filtered info – no waste, only value. Recap sessions with questions. Real life examples.

- Games and the practical tasks.

- It was fun, engaging and had real life examples. The games were very practical-oriented.

- Presentations delivery was interesting, not in a boring way.

- The emphasis was on games, practical tasks and teamwork to strengthen the experience.

What could be improved?

- Include more real-life examples.

- Even more games :)

- Make it longer.

Most useful?

- Games :)

- XP and Kanban knowledge.

- Practicing the Scrum events.

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In conclusion, it was intense… but it was quite a lot of fun too. What is planned next is to deliver the Agile & Scrum foundations training for business and administration to support them in their day-to-day activities. Stay tuned :)