There's a lot of people out there who claim to be agile, however it's so easy to bandy about the A-word these days that it's almost impossible to know if a team is just a bunch of cowboys, wether they're just using trying to fit a waterfall process into an agile time frame (agilefall) or if they are actually doing things properly.

Nokia (yes, the phone company) runs Scrum internally and developed a simple test to determine how agile a team really is.

It's a test in 2 parts.  Part one focuses on iterative development and part two on how well you are doing Scrum.

Here it is:

First, are you doing iterative development?

  • Iterations must be time boxed to less than 4 weeks.
  • Software features must be tested and working at the end of each iteration.
  • The iteration must start before specifications are complete.

Second, are you doing Scrum?

  • You know who the Product Owner is
  • There is a product backlog prioritised by business value
  • The product backlog has estimates created by the team
  • The team generates burndown charts and knows their velocity
  • There are no project managers (or anyone else) disrupting the work of the team

Note that the Product Owner question relates to having an individual product owner - it doesn't say "You know who the Product Owners are".  I've seen teams with two masters trying to do agile and they only ever have problems.

I also find it interesting that there is nothing in the test about having retrospectives, especially as one of the agile principles is the "inspect & adapt" loop, but apart from that it's a good test.  In any case, if a team gets 8 out of 8 in this test then they're most likely doing retrospectives any way.

 

So why don't you take the test.  How does your team score?