A Methodology for Assessing Agile Software Development Methods

Abstract

Agile methods provide an organization or a team the flexibility to adopt a selected subset of principles and practices based on their culture, their values, and the types of systems that they develop. More specifically, every organization or team implements a customized agile method, tailored to better accommodate its needs. However, the extent to which a customized method supports the organizational objectives, or rather the 'goodness' of that method is questionable. Existing agile assessment approaches focus on a comparative analysis, or are limited in scope and application. In this research, we propose a structured, systematic and comprehensive approach to assess the 'goodness' of agile methods. We examine an agile method based on (1) its adequacy, (2) the capability of the organization to support the adopted principles and practices specified by the method, and (3) the method's effectiveness. We propose the Objectives, Principles and Practices (OPP) Framework to guide our assessment. The Framework identifies (1) objectives of the agile philosophy, (2) principles that support the objectives, (3) practices that are reflective of the principles, (4) the linkages between the objectives, principles and practices, and(5) indicators for each practice to assess the effectiveness of the practice and the extent to which the organization supports its implementation. In this document, we discuss our solution approach, preliminary results, and future work.

Maturing in Agile: What Is It About?

“…These approaches intent to measure how agile a team is ( [19], [35]), to evaluate agility comparatively ( [36]), to relate agile practices to project success ( [1]), to define practices to assess maturity ( [7]), to assess the adequacy of an agile method ( [31]), or to identify if agile practices match the organization strategy ( [17]). …”

Systematic mapping on the agility evaluation in software development organizations

“…A continuación, se presentan los resultados del análisis de cada uno de los estudios primarios a través de cada una de las preguntas de investigación. E1 Adept: a unified assessment method for small software companies [25] E2 A disciplined approach to adopting agile practices: the agile adoption framework [26] E3 On the measurement of agility in software process [27] E4 An evaluation of the degree of agility in six agile methods and its applicability for method engineering, 2008 [28] E5 CEFAM: comprehensive evaluation framework for agile methodologies 2008 [29] E6 Project agility assessment: an integrated decision analysis approach 2008 [30] E7 Using a validation model to measure the agility of software development in a large software development organization 2009 [31] E8 A practical measure for the agility of software development processes [32] E9 Study on assessment framework of software process in agile [33] E10 A methodology for assessing agile software development methods [34] E11 A model for measuring agility in small and medium software development enterprises [35] E12 Towards a framework for assessing agility [36] E13 Development of the organizational agility maturity model [37] E14 A reference model for software agility assessment: Agilitymod [15] E15 Assessment of agility in software organizations with a web-based agility assessment tool [38] E16 ASA: agile software development self-assessment method [39] E17 Squad Health Check model [40] E18 Scrum Level [41] Con relación al alcance de la evaluación, el 22,2% de los estudios (E1, E3, E8, E9) propone evaluar el proceso software usado por la organización; otro 22,2% de los estudios (E4, E5, E10, E16) propone evaluar un enfoque de desarrollo en particular, por ejemplo Scrum, XP o una adaptación; el 22,2% de los estudios (E11, E12, E13, E18) propone evaluar la agilidad de una organización, el 16,7% (E6, E14, E15) se enfoca en evaluar la agilidad de un proyecto de desarrollo de software, el 11,1% (E2, E7) ha sido propuesto para evaluar la agilidad tanto de organizaciones como de proyectos, y el estudio E17 que corresponde al 5,5% permite evaluar la agilidad de un equipo de desarrollo (Fig. 1).…”

An empirically-developed framework for Agile transition and adoption: A Grounded Theory approach

“…Sidky et al (2007) proposed a stepwise adoption approach that was based on the maximum potential Agility of an organization that suggests some specific Agile practices for adaptation. This framework, as discussed in Section 3, is subjected to serious criticisms about its weaknesses including high complexity, huge amount of required overhead, inconsistency with the nature of Agile approach, the ignorance of considering business values, low flexibility in its application, forcing companies to choose specific practices, and so forth (Esfahani, 2012;Soundararajan and Arthur, 2011;Soundararajan et al, 2012). As mentioned earlier, the main reason for such problems is proposing a strict and highly disciplined framework.…”

“…At the same time, there are several criticisms against the proposed frameworks which most of them are concerned mainly with their complexity or usability as well as the inconsistency of their nature with Agile approach (Esfahani, 2012;Soundararajan and Arthur, 2011;Soundararajan et al, 2012).The raised criticisms have been elaborated in Section 3. It should be noted that though Agile methods were introduced in the early 2000s, their increasing prevalence has been seen in recent years (VersionOne, 2014;West et al, 2010).…”