Driving Process Improvement via Comparative Agility Assessment

Rather than striving to be “perfectly agile, ” some organizations desire to be more agile than their competition and/or the industry. The Comparative Agility™ (CA) assessment tool can be used to aid organizations in determining their relative agility compared with other teams who responded to CA. The results of CA can be used by a team to guide process improvement related to the use of agile software development practices. This paper provides an overview of industry trends in agility based upon 1, 235 CA respondents in a range of domains and geographical locations. Additionally, the paper goes further in depth on the results of four industrial teams who responded to the CA, explaining why their results were relatively high or low based upon experiences with the teams. The paper also discusses the resultant process improvement reactions and plans of these teams subsequent to reviewing their CA results.

[1]  Lucas Layman,et al.  Extreme programming evaluation framework for object-oriented languages -- version 1.1 , 2003 .

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

[3]  Andrew Begel,et al.  Usage and Perceptions of Agile Software Development in an Industrial Context: An Exploratory Study , 2007, ESEM 2007.

[4]  Mike Cohn,et al.  Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum , 2009 .

[5]  Michel R. V. Chaudron,et al.  A Survey of the Practice of Design -- Code Correspondence amongst Professional Software Engineers , 2007, ESEM 2007.

[6]  Kent L. Beck,et al.  Extreme programming explained - embrace change, Second Edition , 2005, The XP series.

[7]  Lucas Layman,et al.  Exploring extreme programming in context: an industrial case study , 2004, Agile Development Conference.

[8]  William Krebs,et al.  Turning the Knobs: A Coaching Pattern for XP through Agile Metrics , 2002, XP/Agile Universe.

[9]  Ken Schwaber,et al.  Agile Software Development with SCRUM , 2001 .

[10]  Kent L. Beck,et al.  Test-driven Development - by example , 2002, The Addison-Wesley signature series.

[11]  Daniela E. Damian,et al.  Essential communication practices for Extreme Programming in a global software development team , 2006, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[12]  Barry W. Boehm,et al.  Using Risk to Balance Agile and Plan-Driven Methods , 2003, Computer.

[13]  Laurie A. Williams,et al.  Pair Programming Illuminated , 2002 .

[14]  Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology , 1990 .