Today I took the SAFe 6.0 ScrumMaster certification and passed with a score of 80%. Passing is 73%. I was optimizing for passing quickly and not investing a lot of time rather than a high score though.

My path to certification

As background, I’ve been a part time SM (and rest of the time developer) for over a decade and been on a SAFe team for a while.

• Oct 21-24 – took SAFe6 training course – half a day each of the four days. It was online and I felt myself absorbing less each day. It’s hard to pay attention to people talking online for that long every day. I also felt the energy level of fellow students dropping both in the main classroom and in the breakouts. Which became a negative feedback loop.
• Oct 24 – I was also helping get ready for a conference so my brain was somewhat distracted
• Oct 25-27 – went on vacation. Didn’t think about SAFe or work at all
• Oct 28-29 – attended/spoke at/helped run an agile conference. Further distanced myself from class with more information on the topic of agile that wasn’t safe.
• Oct 30 – went to NYC Scrum user group. Awesome talk but again more info on the topic of agile that wasn’t safe. Took first practice test when I got home (and was tired.). Got at 80%. Good enough. it’s a pass.
• Oct 31 – re-read PDF from class and then took real exam in between trick or treaters. Tired and distracted but glad to be done. Pass!

In class they advised us to practice until getting a 90% on the pracitce exam. I did not follow this advice. It’s only $50 for a retake so better to try the real one and see what happened rather than

I didn’t want to leave this for the weekend because I want to spend a bunch of time working on my upcoming book so need to be thinking about Java. Also, you have to take it within 30 days and I’m not going to find myself with more time if I wait.

The exam

All questions were single answer multiple choice with four possible answers. All of them were relatively short which was a pleasure after my experience with the Java 21 exam!

Some were very easy. Some had two reasonable sounding answers. For a number of them you had to know how SAFe would handle the scenario even if that’s not how another agile framework would.

Logistics

The exam is non proctored and you don’t have to show your environment on camera. It was nice not to have to clean up all the programming books and papers around me. The environment is exactly the same as the practice tests one.

After the exam

You get a score report with the % right for each category. This part looks like the report for the practice exam. Unlike the practice exam, you don’t see the questions and which ones you got wrong specifically.

Timing

As I mentioned in my experience with the Java 21 exam blog, I typically finish exams with lots of time to spare. This was a 90 minute exam. I finished my first pass in 34 minutes and my second (to clean up the ones I was unsure of) in 20. really a little less sinceI got up for trick or treaters a few times.