Scrum is founded on empirical process control, and inspection is one of the three pillars.
Each of the Scrum accountabilities participates in one or more inspections. If you feel that there are undesired variances for any aspect of your initiative, think about who could best initiate an inspection.
Inspection is about detecting undesirable variances in progressing towards agreed goals.
So how about the Developers in the Scrum Team.
Developers are typically involved in inspecting progress towards the Sprint and the Product goal, and in inspecting the collaboration during the Sprint itself (people, relationships, process, tools), and the Product Backlog. So quite a lot!
Developers can ask a lot of questions for this. Some examples include
- Where are we now? Is this what we expect? With our current understanding, will we be able to achieve our goals (both for the Sprint and the Product)?
- What improvements from the last Sprint Retrospective have we acted upon and how did these help us forward?
- Do we see variances in our Increment compared to our Definition of Done? Or compared to working agreements such as processes, decision taking, quality levels,
- etc
Developers can use each of the Scrum Events for this.
- During the Daily Scrum they ask questions about their progress towards the Sprint Goal.
- During the Sprint Review and Sprint Planning they ask questions about their progress towards the Product Goal.
- During the Sprint Retrospective they ask questions about their progress towards their effectivity / improvement goals.
Summary:
Developers take part in detecting undesired variances in progress towards the goals. They are involved in detecting variances with regard to the current and future state (near and long term) of the product. And they are evaluating variances in their effectiveness as a team.
Prompt:
Together with the Developers
- Clarify the different goals: Product, Sprint, Definition of Done, and their effectiveness.
- Inspect the current status for undesired variances.
- Evaluate what improvements can be made to close these gaps.
I hope you find value in these short posts and if you are looking for more clarifications, feel free to take contact.
If you want to take a deeper dive into the core concepts we are covering in this blog series, then surely check out our Professional Scrum MasterY workshop. We have some scheduled in the coming period.
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