Development Team Due Diligence Checklist.md

General

• Does everyone speak up? (rework, google, aristotle)
  • 5 characteristics of highly performing teams have to be in place. https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/
• Are essential meetings in place. This usually means refinement sessions, dailies, review sessions and planning sessions.
• Are stories small enough? This is the same as the “is cycle time low”.
  • Cut stories down to small increments
  • Think about clever ways to deliver to the client - fast.
  • Small iterations
• Are stories delivered end-to-end?
  • Only things that are being delivered to the client count.
  • Don't split up stories into eg backend and frontend, where the backend gets done fast - but does not deliver any real client benefit for a while until frontend is done.
• Your product manager should not be involved in execution. Which usually means product attends only planning, refinement (for non-technical things) and review.
• Is cycle time low?
  • Make sure you measure the real thing, and your teams don't game the metric. The metric is for us, and not to control the teams.
  • Rule of thumb: On average bring something live every 5 days
• Is the team stressed out?
• Is the motivation high?
• Are KPIs collected and acted upon?
• Is team happiness collected?
  • Add the outside perspective as well - how is the team perceived by customers, internal stakeholders and so on
• Are meetings effective - notes being taken and action items being followed up?
  • Meeting hygiene should be in place
  • Longer topics should be postponed to external meetings
• Are 1:1s in place and meaningful?
• Are blockers being acted upon
• Are Post Mortems being done. And done properly.
  • https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/
• Is continous learning in place?
  • Retrospectives every two weeks can help.
• Is the engineering quality high enough?
  • Software has to be tested. Bugs should not happen too often. Large rewrites should not be a problem for a senior team.

Team space and documentation

• Is there a team space with purpose, mission and team members?
• Are all meetings documents in team space?
• Do teams have Definition of Ready, Definition of Done?