Last updated on October 15th, 2021 at 11:42 am
What Exactly is Scrum and What is Scrum Master?
Scrum is a structure that helps build team working habits. It encourages teams to use past experiences to learn from them, self organise when working on an issue and analyse both their losses and wins in order to improve. This agile management device defines a set of meetings, instruments and roles which work together in order to help teams in structuring and managing their work.
Scrum masters help in facilitating scrum and is an agile framework that is lightweight. It focuses on time sensitive iterations called sprints and as a facilitator it acts as almost a coach to the team called servant leader. Scrum leaders must consider opportunities that will help the team improve its quality of work while remaining committed to the scrum’s foundation values.
What is Scrum Master Certification and What Does it Entail?
Scrum master certification helps people understand what good scrum is as per official scrum guides. The basis of the certification is the scrum guide. The certified exam for this is lightweight with 100 multiple choice questions drawn over a span of 2 hours and is taken after scrum master training.
What is SAFe?
SAFe happens to be a globally leading framework used to scale Agile across enterprises. It is designed to increase efficiency by driving a faster time to market ratio thus increasing productivity. Lean-Agile transformation is a combination of leadership engagement and education as well as training. Its role-based curriculum assists enterprises in bettering results.
What is SAFe certification and what does it entail?
This certification assists in resolving coordination issues in three stages:
1. Introducing management at an executive level thus passing on available budgets onto different value streams.
2. Organising the value stream within the company in order to generate various products and distinct services.
3. Encouraging more roles and practices at different stream levels.
Its basis is the website and training material provided by them in order to cover a larger span of content than just plain scrum.
The SAFe examination is a lot harder to clear considering its huge course content and highly advanced level of certification. There are 70 questions with a requirement of at least 75% to clear the exam. The exam like the scrum master examination requires training and preparation.
The differences in scrum master certification and SAFe certification are as follows:
Scrum master certification:
- It is structured and curated for a single team.
- It has three primary operational roles - Scrum Master, it’s development teams and the owner of the product.
- Usually four ceremonies are part of this. They are, daily scrum, stand-up meeting, deciding plan and review. This helps in reflecting on issues and rectifying them.
- The scrum master course for certification usually fits into one framework.
- It is mostly self-organised with cross-functional teams being co-located.
- It is more of a foundation level certificate. It can be used as a stepping stone to be able to proceed to more complicated certifications like SAFe.
SAFe certification:
- This could entail a team of a hundred to even a thousand members for turnkey projects.
- It is used majorly in scaled project environment groups.
- The roles covered here, under SAFe, are beyond scrum master certification. Its roles may even go as high as portfolio and program management levels.
- It is not just restricted to team level but can cover ceremonies beyond that as well.
- Covering a combination of multiple frameworks, it proves to be advanced and versatile.
- It can be located in a multitude of sites due to its time flexibility allowing it to be found in different time zones as well. They can thus be called a centralised and decentralised decision making environment.
