Studying for the Scrum PSM II Exam
I’m just logging the resources that I’m using to study for the PSM II. The first pass of the exam took 30 minutes (out of 90). A review of the initial 29 questions took another 30 minutes. It took one hour to complete the 30 questions on the exam.
Official resources
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/introducing-new-psm-assessment-family
- https://www.scrum.org/resources
Remember to also study the Nexus (scaling scrum to multiple teams). This is required as per the definition of PSM II:
Professional Scrum Master II (PSM II)– knows how to be Scrum Master for one or more Scrum teams, understands the underlying principles of Scrum and can effectively apply Scrum in complex, real-world situations.
I’ve listed the resources I’ve used to study for the SPS exam here.
Blogs
Official blogs and the blogs of anyone who could have made the questions (former or current staff of Scrum.org, Gunther Verheyen, Dave West) are useful to read.
Scrum.org Blog
Good posts to read are:
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/agile-value – A case study of Philips and “Agility Index”
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/measuring-success-measuring-value
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/goal-scrum-master-not-make-herself-unneeded
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/agile-it-just-delivery-mechanism – nice image of agile “subway map”
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/searching-self-organisation
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/what-failed-sprint
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/monkeys-managers
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/scrum-master-management-position
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/letter-scrum-masters
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/done-heart-scrum
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/what-scaling-scrum
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/scrum-master-facilitator
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/agile-paradigm-wishing-you-great-2016
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/working-web-development-company-using-scrum
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/5-most-common-pitfalls-scrum-events
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/scrum-master-impediment-remover
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/evolution-scrum-master
- https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/?search=Barry%20Overeem
Ken Scwaber
Ken is one of the co-founders of the Scrum framework, making him a “Source of Truth” when it comes to the exam. His blog posts reveal the philosophy behind areas of Scrum. I’ve gone through and picked out the relevant posts (in order of earliest post date to latest):
- Waterfall, Lean/Kanban, and Scrum
- The Origins Of Scrum’s Ideas And Techniques: An Example
- Agility and PMI
- Empiricism: the Act of Making Decisions Based on What Is
- Scrum is, Scrum is not
- Self-organization and our belief that we are in charge **
- What comes after Scrum
- Evidence of Software’s Value to an Organization
- Do you know how to scale Scrum?
- What is Scaling Scrum? – Advocates making a common architecture / APIs when you have more than 9 teams
- Scaling the Nexus and Scrumbling
- Multiple increment delivery within a Sprint
** means especially useful
Mountain Goat
Articles
- https://medium.com/@lukkrz/how-to-pass-the-professional-scrum-master-2-psm-ii-assessment-e20562538d1f (many of the links here were just taken from this post)
Sample Questions
I’ve only found one place that has 8 sample questions. You have to submit a form with your name and email (there’s no form checking so you can submit it with any values if you like) before you can see your result.
