When Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland created Scrum, they founded it on empirical process control theory, which has three pillars: transparency, inspection, and adaption.

Transparency comes in many forms in our Scrum team, mainly through the tenet of making work visible. The Scrum Board plainly shows what our team is working on. There is no hidden work in Scrum; our team members are open and forthcoming about what they are working on when discussing it at the Daily Scrum or the Sprint Review. Even the Product Backlog is available for all to see.

Scrum provides high-bandwidth information regarding our team, our process, and the product on which we're working. At various points, we can inspect the information that we receive and make adjustments to how we work, or what we're working on. If new data comes to light, we adapt and change it up.

In empirical processes, all knowledge is gained through sensory experience and custom and tradition should be avoided. In this way, we should encourage our Scrum team to challenge the status quo and prevent any this-is-how-we-do-things-around-here thinking. If we do, we will benefit from profound changes in our approach that will significantly increase our chances of success.

In the Scrum framework, there are multiple opportunities to inspect and adapt:

• During Sprint Planning, as the team determine how they will implement the Sprint Backlog
• At the Daily Scrum, when new information is uncovered during the implementation of a User Story
• When a User Story is completed, or a new feature is delivered; we check in with our Product Owner or business owner to verify it is as expected
• At the Sprint Review, when our stakeholders are invited to give feedback
• During the Sprint Retrospective, when we can uncover what is and isn't working well, and we create a plan to take action and change things up

These are all checkpoints for us to consider if new information has come to light since the last time we met and decided what to do.