The Nokia Test
Nokia (the cell phone maker) uses Scrum. They have developed a test to check whether a team is really using Scrum or just doing what I call Cowboy Agile (see wikipedia on cowboy coding).
The Nokia Test is in two parts. First, are you doing Iterative Development?
* 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
The experience is that if you ask a lot of Scrum shops if they can pass this part of the test, they can't. Not a single team.
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
There could, of course, be a lot of discussion of this test. Should existing questions be changed? Should other things be added? How do you interpret each question? Etc. But it's a start.
You are welcome to discuss these issues on this wiki, or on Yahoo Scrum-Dev.
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