Scrum is founded on empirical process control, and inspection is one of the three pillars.
Each of the Scrum Artifacts is inspected in one or more Scrum Events to detect undesired variances. If you feel something isn’t running as expected, have a good look with your team at your Artifacts for what could be going on.
Inspection is about detecting undesirable variances in progressing towards agreed goals.
Let’s take the Increment.
The Increment is inspected at least during the Sprint Review in order to detect variances in the current state of the Product compared to customer and market expectations.
Do we have the expected capabilities? How does the market respond to the product? How are we progressing toward the Product Goal?
It is typically inspected by the entire Scrum Team in collaboration with stakeholders.
Other questions that can be asked are:
- What is the current value the Increment provides? How happy are users? And is this improving or declining?
- What capabilities are available yet do not seem to be used, and why is this? What capabilities are no longer valuable to users?
- What additional value can be created? In our current markets, or in other markets?
Summary:
Inspect your Increment to detect variances in the current state of the product compared to expectations of the market.
Prompt:
With your entire team evaluate your Increment.
- What are the challenges of your users?
- What does our current product address?
- What might be beneficial to your users, clients, and market?
- What might be too much in the Increment that hardly provides value?
I hope you find value in these short posts and if you are looking for more clarification, feel free to make contact.
If you want to take a deeper dive into the core concepts we are covering in this blog series, then be sure to check out our Professional Scrum MasterY workshop. We have some scheduled in the coming period.
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