Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Nokia Test: Are you really agile?

I have recently had discussions with several management colleagues about agile and find that most are not really getting far enough to realize the full value of agile. Jeff Sutherland and many other champions for the Scrum model presecribe the Nokia Agile Test as a litmus test to deterimine if a team really is agile. This test was developed by Nokia internally to assess development teams at Nokia and their partners. Nokia has the largest number of certified ScrumMasters in a company in the world today. Nokia first determines if the team is able to abopt Scrum by determining if they are doing iterative developement.
  • Iterations must be timeboxed to less than six weeks
  • Software must be tested and working at the end of an iteration
  • Iteration must start before specification is complete
Next, the Nokia Scrum Test...
  • 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

I would also add some items to the list...

  • The story includes clearly defined acceptance test(s) [validates requirement complete]
  • The accpetance test(s) are automated, part of the code base, and run as a regression suite on a regular basis
  • The story is not fully complete (implemented) until the acceptance test(s) are automated
The bottom line is that there are many companies that think they are doing Scrum, but aren't really and are plagued by legacy processes and measures. It is fine to take small steps to migrate your organization to agile, but keep going until you really get there.

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