Scrum Team Maturation

This is what I think I know about scrum team maturation.

I have heard alot of conversions about how a team becomes more mature or even how mature is a scrum team. This got me to thinking and I first thought does a team does all of the scrum ceremonies, Daily Stand up-check, Frequently and regular grooming meetings-check, does the team have a planning session at the beginning of each-check, does the team perform a regular sprint review-check and finally does the team do a sprint retrospective-Check. So once the team is doing these ceremonies, the team has a good start with scrum and how it should be run. So now we should look at each of the ceremonies and to see how mature the team is in each of the scrum ceremonies.

In the daily stand up does everyone participate and contribute. Is there enough time after the daily stand up to discuss various different questions, comments are concerns that were raised during the daily stand up. Does the team adapt to new conditions from the last 24 hours? Does the team have a definition of done and does it follow it?

In the grooming meetings does the team size the most important tickets that are queued up for the next sprint, does the team discuss each of the tickets, do the tickets get sized using planning poker as a team, does the team have a definition of ready and is it being followed. Is each ticket following INVEST?

At the planning meeting does the entire team review the tickets that are allocated in the next sprint by the PO, can they look ahead and take a ticket from a future sprint if needed? Are all tickets in planning sized and ready to be discussed or are there more than a few tickets that are critical and not sized yet. How many tickets were not completed from the prior sprint AKA did the team meet their sprint goal? Does the team plan for interrupts that happen during the sprint AKA “Illegitimus Non Interruptus”, does the team use the pattern of “Yesterday’s Weather” to help plan the sprint. Does the team have 100% openness on what may arise during the sprint, time off, holidays, vacations, training requirements, releases, etc? It is also known that teams that finish early accelerate faster is the team planning to help achieve this, to make this happen does the team ask to remove more and more tickets to the sprint to help avoid the pattern of “Muri”

Sprint reviews once you have them is the team sharing metrics with the business panthers? Are the business stakeholders actively engaged? Is there a demo of the work? Does the business ask questions on what is going to be worked on next? And does the team have the ability to adjust to meet the goal. Is the velocity of the team discuss? The quality of the product?

Sprint retrospectives are all of the members of the team engaged and are ready with items to discuss. Things that went well or things that the team needs to improve on? Are there action items from the sprint review on what the team can do to improve…Is the team hard on ideas but easy on the people? Does the team add items to the back that they can work on in a future sprint?

This is by no means a definite way of defining maturity and I didn’t even go into depth on what metrics can be used to help track maturity or other KPIs nor did I discuss how the development or QA or the PO can mature individually. These are topics for another post….Happy Scruming!