How do we know if scrum team is getting better?

How is the delivery of value being measured?

Interesting question and one that I hear quite often, especially from leadership and Agile "coaches."

Let's not forget that Agile originated from Product, and not the other way around.

Twenty years ago, Hyundai and Kia vehicles were mocked in the US. Today, they're one of the most popular cars and SUVs on the market. Their product development team got better because their product got better and resulted in happy customers and healthy profits.

Focus on the product, not the process.

If the team is getting better with the scrum framework, does that mean the team can handle bigger sprint goals? What would be the indicators?

Sprint goals, and the value delivered, and the validated learnings achieved as a result of these Sprint Goals would be good indicators.

For instance, if the Sprint Goals currently represent completion of planned work, a shift towards achieving a particular outcome (e.g. customer or user behaviour, revenue generated, feature adoption, etc) would enable much more effective inspection.

Ultimately, with outcome-oriented Sprint Goals, it should be easier to consider what value (either in terms of increased product value, or new insights) was achieved, even before the end of the Sprint.

This can be considered over time to determine whether the results of the team are improving.

In addition to what has been mentioned here are some other items to consider:

• Quality of the Increment is a good measure. What trends have been seen over time?
• What evidence is there that the Development Team has become more self-organizing?
• Team Health and Happiness - what do the trends look like? 
• Flow metrics: Cycle time (trends lower over time)

An increase in velocity is of course the measure of efficiency increase, but what for me as a scrum master is more important, is the atmosphere of openness. During the retrospective each member can share their thoughts freely, without any fear. The whole team benefits from the feedback of its members and this is the basis of the learning process.

Some of the key indicators:

[1] increased Velocity of the team 

[2] The team is able to deliver what is committed in sprint planning consistently without rolling over to next sprint or de-scope the less priority items during the sprint which is not impacting sprint goal

[3] The team agile matrix is improved (spider/Radar chart). Usually organization level Agile Coach who will be working and monitoring, consolidating the results from all scrum team at organization level or department level.

[4] The Scrum Master is able to focus more on coaching, mentoring then teaching and facilitating

[5] The development team is more self-organized, and the product owner is focus more on the product vision

[6] Better backlog grooming in 1/2 sprints in advance

etc.

Thanks.

An increase in velocity is of course the measure of efficiency increas

[1] increased Velocity of the team 

This all depends on what you use to measure velocity.  If Story Points are the measure then this is not a legit indicator of a team getting better at Sprints.  It could show that the team has figured out how to use Story Points to give the impression that they are getting better.  If they realize that Story Points are their primary measure of success, teams can (and have) just bumped up their estimates to make it look like they are doing more when in fact they could be doing fewer stories and not deliverying increments of potentially releasable value. 

I'm wondering if there are any measurements that we can use to objectively measure if our team is getting better at sprints?

As many of the first posters said, value delivered in the form of potentially releaseable increments is the most important way to determine if a team "is getting better at sprints".  And that is because value delivered is the only real thing that matters.  For example would you call it "getting better" if a team starts to do more story points, more actual stories, has a great working relationship, makes all of their own decisions about what they will do during the sprint, and follows all of the guidelines in the Scrum Guide but they are not creating anything that the stakeholders see as valuable?

Sure, increases in all of the things I said does indicate that the team is becoming better at working as a unit which is something that all Scrum Masters would love to see.  But in the end, if all of their work and relationship advances do not produce value for the stakeholders they really aren't improving the value that they give to the organization who signs their paychecks.