Are you really doing Scrum? The Nokia Test
I came across this article recently on a test devised by Nokia to figure out if teams are really doing Scrum or if they just think they are.
There are two parts to the test, the first asks questions based around iterative development and the second focuses on making sure the main aspects of Scrum are present.
From the article:
First, are you doing Iterative Development?
- Iterations must be timeboxed to less than 4 weeks
- Software features must be tested and working at the end of each iteration
- The Iteration must start before specification is complete
The experience is that if you ask a lot of “Scrum” teams if they can pass this part of the test, they can’t. If you are at a conference, often not a single team in the room.
The next part of the test checks whether you are doing Scrum (in Nokia’s opinion):
- You know who the product owner is
- There is a product backlog prioritized 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
So the big question then: Are we doing Scrum?
According to the criteria in this test, yes! Of course that’s solely based on my answers to the questions so maybe a poll of my team would yield different results. It would certainly be an interesting insight to see if we had any differences in answers.
