Sunday 15 June 2008

The Nokia Test

About a month ago I have decided to ask everyone in the department to rate our scrum implementation based on questions from the nokia test. I think this was a brilliant idea because it exposed a number of problems with both the teams and the product owners. Also some of the questions were misunderstood by several team members. The summary of results is below:
1. Iteration length less than 6 weeks – 91.67%
2. Fixed iterations – 100%
3. Product Backlog items always estimated – 0%
4. Velocity known– 91.67%
5. Burndown charts generated – 100%
6. Product Owner known – 66.67%
7. No Project Managers interfering – 75%
Interesting that for example on question number one somebody said he isn't quite sure if iterations should be less than 6 weeks and fixed at all! Also somebody has replied with "I don't know what it is" to question number 4(?!). The results of 6 and 7 were just a good reminder to some of our managers to stop messing with scrum.
Overall we had a very positive response following these results so I am thinking about doing it every 6 months ;)