20 Questions Team

20 Questions a New Scrum Master should ask a Team to Get up to Speed

1. How large is your product backlog?
2. What is the typical age of a user story in the product backlog?
3. What is your average lead time from an idea being added to the product backlog to its delivery?
4. Does your product backlog contain user stories none of the current team members are familiar with?
5. How often are you grooming the product backlog?
6. On how many user stories are you working in parallel during backlog grooming?
7. How long does the grooming of a typical user story take?
8. How are you creating user stories? (Is it a joint team effort with the PO or is the product owner writing the user stories and the team estimates them?)
9. Where are you discussing user stories? Only during grooming sessions or also on Slack or via comments on tickets, for example?
10. Do you apply a "definition of ready" standard to your user stories?
11. If so, of what criteria is your "definition of ready" composed of?
12. Who is writing acceptance criteria and in what format?
13. How are you estimating the likely effort of a user story?
14. Are you estimating in man-­hours or story points?
15. How are you practicing the estimation process, if the team shares different opinions?
16. What is a typical distribution of story sizes in your sprint backlogs?
17. Are you re­estimating user stories at the end of a sprint? If so, under which circumstances are you doing so?
18. What was your velocity for the last three sprints?
19. How many user stories are typically not finished within a sprint and for what reasons?
20. Are you changing user stories once they have become an item of a sprint backlog? And if so, under what circumstances?