Job Preparation

I am building a list of the questions I want to find out from each team to figure out the state of their processes. I have a feeling that many of these teams are doing a modified waterfall instead of agile. I expect to find that instead of having teams working toward  getting user stories accepted each sprint that I will find the typical development working away and delivering code late into a sprint and QA scrambling to accept two weeks work in the last day of the sprint.

Here are some data points I am interest in:
* Is there an automated build?
* It there a continuous build kicked off by check-ins?
* Are there unit tests?
* Are unit tests part of the build?
* Are there automated backend tests?
* Are automated backend tests part of the build?
* Are there automated UI tests?
* Are automated UI tests part of the build?
* How long does a build take to complete?
* Does everyone have sandbox environments to run their own tests in?
* Is there a code review process?

* What is the length of the team sprints?

* How often does the project ship?

* Are their burn down charts for recent sprints?

* Are they using story points and tasks?

* Do their user stories include tasks for unit tests, automated tests, usability tests etc?

I am sure I will think of many more questions to assess where each team is at in creating an effective Agile process. But I think this is a good start. I don't imagine that everyone will be able to check off everything on this list and I don't expect to get them their over night. But a first step in fixing issues is assessing what they are so you can create an attack plan. For example, if I want unit tests and a team has no unit tests then we can start adding some user stories to add some unit tests each sprint and before long we will start having some code coverage!