Focus on Ways of Working
Teams strive to smooth the flow of work so that goals can be achieved more predictably, more efficiently and with better quality. Over time, and as the team matures, the scope of working practice is extended. With an increase of maturity, less work is left undone by the team - work that will need to be completed by other teams or work groups. The team experiments with new practices and technologies, adopting those that prove useful and rejecting others.
In A Nutshell
Teams improve their performance in a number of ways including technology change, acquiring knowledge and skills, improved tooling and, most importantly, by reviewing their ways of working. Continuous learning and improvement is at the heart of the inspect and adapt behaviour. Learning teaches about what we might be able to improve; improvement makes those ideas real.
Teams experiment with new ways of working because, no matter how good our ideas sound, it may turn out that we are just wrong. Nor is improvement a one-step affair. To achieve any one specific goal, we may need to implement multiple changes to our ways of working. Once we have achieved that goal, the theory of constraints shows that we need to go looking for the next improvement we can make.
Practices
Blameless Post-Mortems are adopted as part Google’s Site Reliability Engineering framework. The concept has existed for sometime as part of traditional Service Operations. Its use within SRE shows its adoption in "DevOps” too. In this context, post-mortems are used to analyse the causes of operational failures and to decide how to improve the situation.
The team or wider organisation may readily identify that there are problems with its current way of working, that it wishes to improve its performance, or change its technology. Understanding the problem is inherently simpler than identifying a solution. Even if a potential solution is evident, we may be uncertain about its effectiveness. We experiment with changes to understand whether they will be effective and, if so, the extent of improvement we can realise.
Teams use service measures to understand whether the service they are providing to the customers meets the levels of service they have committed to. With sufficient history of data, we can begin to look at trends to see how quality of service is changing over time. The levels of service and trend information help the team to focus their attention on the improvements they need to make. We prioritise changes that will have the biggest impact on our Quality of Service.
The team uses measures of delivery in order to understand its current rate of delivery. After data has been gathered for some time, trend analysis may reveal how rate of delivery is changing over time. The rate of delivery and its trend help the team to understand whether and where they need to focus their attention in order to meet their own and stakeholders expectations.
The Sprint Retrospective is a Scrum event. Its purpose is to allow the team to inspect and adapt its way of working, the functioning of the team, the working context and all other factors which may impact the team’s ability to deliver its goals. Some factors the team have direct control over, other factors will require external influence to change.