Abstract: On a certain level of maturity every Agile team asks itself – are we doing Agile or not? Do we comply, for example, combination of Scrum & XP? When your company has five, ten or twenty such teams it is necessary to track and correct them in order to provide an appropriate company-wide level of process and product quality.
Since there is no global Agile certification in the world, many teams created their own Agile checklists – team assessment forms to appreciate their agility. What to do - find and use one of existed forms or create your own – it depends on your process specific and your experience in teams assessments. For example, Luxoft started to use a self-assessment form from Dean Leffingwell – an author of Scaling Software Agility book. During last three years, while we make Agile teams assessments, we created our own self-assessment form based on external known forms and our expertise, especially in distributed Agile.
Our experience in team’s assessments shows us that it is very useful both for a company in general and for each team under assessment. For a company it creates a big picture of what is going on in Agile projects. For a team it makes a good input data for retrospectives and helps to warn about potencial problems that are not visible inside a team.