We are going to discuss about how continuous self assessment can help the teams to achieve the next level of agility.

1. Self-Assessment to the
Rescue

2. ABOUT ME
VINAY KUMAR
SAFe Coach/Consultant at CGI
14+ years of IT experience
8+ years in Agile Projects
6 years as Scrum Master/Agile Coach/SAFe Consultant
CSM, CSP, SA, SASM, ICP-ACC
Email ID - Vinay.vinay.vinay@gmail.com

3. What Are We Talking About Here?

4. What Happens when We lose Agility?

5. Or This?

6. Or may be this…….

7. Learnings
Agility is important, be it in life or in business
Agility is a key factor to get the consistent results
We should keep doing regular assessment on
agility

8. Self-Assessment Areas
Product Backlog Ownership
Iteration Health
Team Health
Increment/Release Health
Technical Health

9. Product Backlog Ownership

10. Product Backlog Ownership – Questionnaires
Product Owner facilitates user story development, prioritization and
negotiation
Product Owner collaborates proactively with Product Management and
other stakeholders
User Stories are small, estimated, functional and vertical
Product owner facilitates development of acceptance criteria which
are used in planning, review and story acceptance
Teams refine the backlog every sprint
Non-functional requirements are determined early enough to
appropriately influence design and testing and added to the backlog

11. Sprint Health

12. Sprint Health – Questionnaires
Team plans the sprint collaboratively, effectively and efficiently
Team always has clear sprint goals and commits to meeting them
Teams apply acceptance criteria and Definition of Done to story acceptance
Team has a predictable, normalized velocity which is used for estimating
and planning
Estimates are created collaboratively by the people who will do the work
Team is consistent on delivering their sprint goals
Status of all the in-progress items is visible to the team all the time
Clear visibility on the blocked items (with reasons) to the team all the time.

13. Team Health

14. Team Health – Questionnaires
Team members Trust/respect each other
help each other completing sprint goals
Manage interdependencies and stay in-sync with each other
Team holds collaborative, effective and efficient planning and daily
meetings where all members participate, status is given clearly, issues are
discussed, questions are clarified, impediments are raised on timely manner
Team members are available for all the meeting during the sprint
Team members use pull planning (based on available capacity) mechanism
to bring in accountability in the team

15. Team Health – Questionnaires
Team is matured enough in coming to a conclusion for contradictory views
before they become lingering conflicts
Team members are matured in sharing information and knowledge with each
other
Team is empowered in estimating their work without any influence or
pressure from Business/Management
Team is empowered to decide how much they can pick during their sprint.
Team members attends SOS on daily basis to ensure team is aware of
dependencies (if any) progress and or changes happening in other teams
Team holds a retrospective after each sprint and makes incremental changes
to continually improve its performance

16. Increment/Release Health

17. Increment/Release Health – Questionnaires
Team present and participates in System Demo every Sprint, illustrating real
progress towards objectives
Team reliably meet 80-100% of work item committed
Team produces an increment of working software (Potentially shippable
product) every iteration
Team is able to keep the defect to a minimum on consistent basis
All defects are fixed during the iteration in which they are found
Release are quite smooth and without any major issues
Minimal or no UAT/PROD defects

18. Technical Health

19. Technical Health – Questionnaires
Team actively reduce technical debt in each sprint
Automated acceptance tests and unit tests are part of story DoD
Refactoring is always underway
CI, build and test automation infrastructure is improving
Unit test, code reviews, peer reviews are part of DOD
The entire system is built automatically at least once per day.
Most code is written using test-driven development??
Team members pair program at appropriate times/Code is written using
pair-programming??

20. Other Areas For Assessment?
CULTURE
OUTCOME
LEARNINGS/KAIZEN

21. Assessment to Super Agility
Everyone working at least 9 hours per day on project work?
Velocity is going up by at least 20% every sprint
Story points are accurately converted into hours during the sprint planning
Everyone reports the EOD status to Lead
Etc…

22. What Next
Assess the comments
Identify the action plan
Consult with the team
Create a backlog for Improvements
Add improvements backlog items to the
team’s backlog or the way your team is
handling it efficiently!

23. Overall View

24. Advantages
self-assessment will help in bringing out
the bed practices team following on
or will help in identifying the good
practices team stopped following on
Help the team in achieving great agile
maturity or Agility