I’ve never done any formal agile training, and I don’t intend to start now.
The truth is, agile training just wasn’t around when I started out in the 2000’s. Instead, I worked in a development team that embraced Extreme Programming by following the rules and practising the values, and later on, I used to literally carry around a printed copy of the Scrum Guide and spend my spare time reading Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum Papers. Lots of experimentation happened along the way, not all successful. But it was a thoroughly exciting time.
Fast forward to 2019, and I actually wrote a blog post about the day I removed agile from my CV; however, that was largely a reactionary statement to the blossoming certification mill ie. the proliferation of one or two-day bootcamps with a trivial multiple-choice exam to become a ‘certified’ Scrum Master or Product Owner. Setting aside that market perversion, the benefits of agile are still very clear to me, and alive and well in my โค๏ธ today.
Better Software UK, my software requirements business is flourishing, but you won’t hear me mention ‘agile’ very much, nor embed Scrum and coach agile teams like I used to. Rather, clients quickly see sense in using high-level epics for direction setting and roadmap planning, whilst all other detail is deferred until the last possible moment and provided only to the extent that developers require it.
Everything else comes naturally in good time, and we learn together by doing.