20 questions to determine whether your teams are mature enough

With more than 26 years of experience, as a consultant, I help organizations in the .NET space to professionalize their entire software development efforts, from idea to production. During such visits, I get to scrutinize their development practices, quality standards, design principles, the tools they use, their deployment pipeline, the team dynamics, the requirements process and much more. In this series of short posts, I’ll share some of the most common pain points I run into.

In the previous post of this series, I’ve provided you with a couple of angles that can help you determine whether your architecture, your code and your documentation are a consistent whole. And with that, I completed the more technical part of this series of posts. In this final post, I’m going to change direction and talk about the predictability and maturity of your development team(s). Here’s a bunch of questions you can ask to help you assess the situation.

• Are your development teams already working under the principles of Scrum, Kanban or a combination of those, but they never managed to achieve a stable velocity? Do you think this a problem or do you think this in an inherent aspect of software development in general?
• Are teams struggling to break down the work in appropriately-sized chunks that allow…