A Comprehensive Evaluation of Agile Maturity Self-assessment Surveys

Agile methodologies are adapted by growing number of software organizations. Agile maturity (also called agility) assessment is a way to ascertain the degree of this adoption and determine a course of action to improve agile maturity. There are a number of agile maturity assessment surveys in order to assess team or organization agility and many of them require no guidance. However, the usability of these surveys are not widely studied. The purpose of this study is to determine available agile maturity self-assessment surveys and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses for agile maturity assessment. An extensive case study is conducted to measure the sufficiency of 22 available agile maturity self-assessment surveys according to the seven expected features: comprehensiveness, fitness for purpose, discriminativeness, objectivity, conciseness, generalizability, and suitability for multiple assessment. Our case study results show that they do not satisfy all of the expected features fully but are helpful in some degree based on the purpose of usage.

[1]  Stefan Wagner,et al.  What Do Practitioners Vary in Using Scrum? , 2015, XP.

[2]  Adam Wojciechowski,et al.  Toward maturity model for extreme programming , 2001, Proceedings 27th EUROMICRO Conference. 2001: A Net Odyssey.

[3]  James A. Highsmith,et al.  Adaptive Software Development: A Collaborative Approach to Managing Complex Systems , 1999 .

[4]  Lefteris Angelis,et al.  Investigating the applicability of Agility assessment surveys: A case study , 2014, J. Syst. Softw..

[5]  Shawn N. Fraser,et al.  Case Studies of Industry-Academia Research Collaborations for Software Development with Agile , 2017, CRIWG.

[6]  P. Krutchen,et al.  The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction , 2000 .

[7]  Kalpana Sureshchandra,et al.  Adopting Agile in Distributed Development , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering.

[8]  Christine Nadel,et al.  Case Study Research Design And Methods , 2016 .

[9]  Timothy Wells Dynamic Software Development: Managing Projects in Flux , 2002 .

[10]  Vahid Garousi,et al.  A Survey of Software Engineering Practices in Turkey (extended version) , 2014, J. Syst. Softw..

[11]  Onur Demirörs,et al.  Causes of Continuity and Participation Problems in Process Improvement with Staged Maturity Models , 2015, SPICE.

[12]  Onur Demirörs,et al.  Agile Maturity Self-Assessment Surveys: A Case Study , 2017, 2017 43rd Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA).

[13]  Shane Warden,et al.  The art of agile development , 2007 .

[14]  Vahid Garousi,et al.  Cross-factor analysis of software engineering practices versus practitioner demographics: An exploratory study in Turkey , 2016, J. Syst. Softw..

[15]  Kent L. Beck,et al.  Extreme programming explained - embrace change , 1990 .

[16]  Miguel Mira da Silva,et al.  Scrum Maturity Model , 2011 .

[17]  Konstantinos Chronis,et al.  Measuring Agility- A Validity Study on Tools Measuring The Agility Level of Software Development Teams , 2015 .

[18]  Brian Henderson-Sellers,et al.  A framework to support the evaluation, adoption and improvement of agile methods in practice , 2008, J. Syst. Softw..

[19]  Onur Demirörs,et al.  Assessing Software Processes over a New Generic Software Process Assessment Tool , 2017 .

[20]  Mary Poppendieck,et al.  Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit , 2003 .

[21]  Hazura Zulzalil,et al.  On the current agile assessment methods and approaches , 2014, 2014 8th. Malaysian Software Engineering Conference (MySEC).

[22]  Taghi Javdani Gandomani,et al.  Agility Assessment Model to Measure Agility Degree of Agile Software Companies , 2014 .

[23]  Jeff Sutherland,et al.  The Scrum Guide , 2012 .

[24]  Onur Demirörs,et al.  Do staged maturity models result in organization-wide continuous process improvement? Insight from employees , 2017, Comput. Stand. Interfaces.

[25]  Philippe Kruchten,et al.  The Rational Unified Process: An Introduction , 1998 .

[26]  Alistair Cockburn,et al.  Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams , 2004 .

[27]  Karsten Nebe,et al.  Agile Human-Centred Design: A Conformance Checklist , 2016, HCI.

[28]  Jeff Sutherland,et al.  Manifesto for Agile Software Development , 2013 .

[29]  Antònia Mas Picahaco,et al.  ISO/IEC 15504 Adaptation for Software Process Assessment in SMEs , 2003, Software Engineering Research and Practice.

[30]  Onur Demirörs,et al.  A Reference Model for Software Agility Assessment: AgilityMod , 2015, SPICE.

[31]  Jos J. M. Trienekens,et al.  Assessing the adoption level of scaled agile development: a maturity model for Scaled Agile Framework , 2017, J. Softw. Evol. Process..

[32]  Jay Packlick,et al.  The Agile Maturity Map A Goal Oriented Approach to Agile Improvement , 2007, Agile 2007 (AGILE 2007).

[33]  Steve R. Palmer,et al.  A Practical Guide to Feature-Driven Development , 2002 .

[34]  Isaac Pentinmaki,et al.  Review of "Lean software development: an agile tookit" by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. Addison Wesley 2003. , 2004, SOEN.

[35]  Mauri Leppänen,et al.  A Comparative Analysis of Agile Maturity Models , 2011, ISD.

[36]  James D. Arthur,et al.  A disciplined approach to adopting agile practices: the agile adoption framework , 2007, Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering.

[37]  Algan Uskarc,et al.  Do staged maturity models result in organization-wide continuous process improvement? Insight from employees , 2017 .

[38]  Onur Demirörs,et al.  Evaluation of Agility Assessment Tools: A Multiple Case Study , 2016, SPICE.