An Agile team health check is a structured assessment of how well a team is functioning across the dimensions that determine long-term delivery performance. It is distinct from a retrospective -- which looks at a specific sprint -- and from a project status review -- which looks at delivery progress.
A health check looks at the team's underlying capability: the habits, practices, and dynamics that produce results over time, rather than in any single sprint.
Done regularly, it surfaces degradation before it becomes a crisis. Done after a troubled period, it identifies root causes rather than symptoms.
The Eight Dimensions
1. Sprint predictability. What percentage of committed sprint work is delivered? A predictable team completes 80-90% of sprint commitments consistently. Below 70% sustained over three or more sprints signals systemic problems with estimation, interruption, or scope management. Above 100% consistently may indicate under-commitment.
2. Backlog health. Are items in the top of the backlog ready for sprint planning -- estimated, written to a clear definition of ready, and free of unresolved dependencies? A backlog where the top ten items are always ready indicates a functional refinement process. A backlog where the team regularly starts sprint planning with unclear items indicates a backlog hygiene problem.
3. Impediment resolution speed. How quickly are impediments resolved once raised in the sprint? Impediments that persist across multiple sprints without progress indicate either insufficient Scrum Master advocacy or organisational blockers that are not being escalated.
4. Retrospective action follow-through. What percentage of retrospective action items are completed within one sprint? A team that consistently generates retro actions and does not follow through is investing time in retrospectives without capturing the value. Below 50% follow-through rate is a warning signal.
5. Psychological safety. Do team members raise problems, disagreements, and uncertainties openly? This is harder to measure numerically, but observable in whether retros produce genuine discussion or polite surface-level conversation, and whether team members raise individual struggles or wait until they are a crisis.
6. Definition of Done adherence. What percentage of delivered items fully meet the team's Definition of Done? If items are regularly accepted with DoD criteria deferred or waived, technical debt is accumulating and quality is being traded for velocity.
7. Stakeholder satisfaction. Do stakeholders find sprint reviews useful? Are they engaged with the product backlog and providing meaningful feedback? Stakeholders who stop attending reviews or provide minimal feedback signal a gap between what the team is delivering and what stakeholders actually need.
8. Technical debt trend. Is technical debt growing, stable, or reducing? A team carrying increasing technical debt will see velocity decline as the codebase becomes harder to work with. This dimension requires input from the team's technical leads.
How to Run It
A practical format is a team survey -- each dimension rated on a 1-5 scale by each team member independently, followed by a facilitated discussion of the results.
The discussion is where the value is. The survey surfaces where the team's perceptions diverge from each other, which dimensions the team rates as weak, and which the team rates as strong despite external evidence to the contrary.
Run the health check at the start of a new programme increment, after a difficult delivery period, or quarterly for ongoing teams. Do not run it more frequently than quarterly -- health dimensions change slowly and over-assessment creates survey fatigue.
What to Do with the Results
Choose two or three dimensions to address -- not all of them. A team that tries to improve every dimension simultaneously improves none.
Prioritise the dimensions where: the current rating is lowest, the impact on other dimensions is highest, and the team has the most control over the outcome.
Impediment resolution speed and retrospective follow-through are often high-leverage starting points because they compound -- a team that removes impediments faster and follows through on retro actions gets faster at improving itself.
Subscribe to Agile Pulse for practical Agile and AI guidance for practitioners navigating real delivery environments.