First ‘Certified Scrum Product Owner’ training in France took place June 11th and 12th in La Défense and we were there.

Organized by Xebia, it was animated by Arlen Bankston, a certified Scrum Trainer and of course a member of the SCRUM alliance. 30 participants, a 2 days course in English in the text (good level required): here is a report.

The training plan was unsurprising:

• Short introduction to agile methods and Scrum presentation: process, roles, zoom on the PO;
• PO job for the different step of the process: during sprint 0 (Arlen calls it ‘discovery session’), release planning, sprints (sprint planning, daily scrums, sprint review, retrospective);
• Artefacts: vision, personas, use cases, scenarios, business value, story map, scrum board;
• And also good practices that make the difference, such as storyboard prototyping and TDD.

Two days for such a program is a bit short. Moreover when the public has different skills: time could be gained on the agile methods introduction, as it is a pre requisite. But even optimising that, a three days course won’t be luxury. Nevertheless, Arlen succeeded in covering the essentials, without giving the impression we were in a hurry.

A little bit of introspection…

We could see that we were very close to a ‘Scrum by the book’ practice. Even if the gurus shouts that ‘it’s a Framework’, and that you just have to use what is useful for your organization, we adopted the essential practices 2 years ago. Vision document, storyboards, demo with the client, retrospective to perpetual self-improvement: all that is the rhythm of our projects.

Scrum in France?

This event was the occasion for us to measure adoption and Scrum’s practice in France. Agile methodes, especially Scrum, are currently hype there. That was confirmed in French Scrum User Group ‘Méthodes agiles 2009’ survey: ‘Scrum is becoming mainstream’ (sic).

We can see several motivations:

• For the client: respects of delivery dates, delivery frequency, transparency, users’ satisfaction;
• For the provider: better quality quest, continuous self improvement of the team and practices.