There are four basic attributes to measure the health of your Scrum team:
The team’s priority and vision is clear and understood.
It’s working if: you ask anyone on the team to describe the roadmap and they all answer the same way.
It could be better if: your team is struggling with communicating the vision concisely. Consider publishing your roadmap/strategy document and sharing it with your team.
One team is responsible for the entire development process, from design to deploy.
It’s working if: the entire team feels heard in decision making and is responsible for delivery of a quality product, soup-to-nuts.
It could be better if: design work waterfalls into development, or development waterfalls into QA. Both of these cause frustration that can be solved simply by involving them in your Scrum meetings.
The team estimates work to clarify effort, not to predict timing.
It’s working if: the team estimates that this “feels like a 3’s worth of effort“. Your team breaks down work into manageable chunks and assigns an estimated level of effort. The team understands that they can’t predict the future, and does not attempt to estimate the length of time necessary to complete the work.
It’s not working if: the team estimates that this “feels like a 3’s worth of time“. It’s important that your estimation meetings don’t become project management sessions, and especially important that you don’t attribute x story points to x days of work. Ask the team to take timing completely off the table in grooming meetings.
The team does not assign arbitrary deadlines.
It’s working if: the team sets the deadlines. They understand that urgency is a limited resource and should be used only when necessary.
It’s not working if: your team feels like it is having problems finishing work “quick enough”. Consider pushing back on external sources that are asking for a completed date, and over-communicating progress and blockers. Remember that it’s probably not that your developers are slow.