The prospects of a quantitative measurement of agility: A validation study on an agile maturity model (original) (raw)

Towards a Quantitative Measurement of Agility : A Validation Study on an Agile Maturity Model

2019

Agile Development has now become a well-known approach to collaboration in professional work life. Both researchers and practitioners want validated tools to measure agility. This study sets out to validate an agile maturity measurement model with statistical tests and empirical data. First, a pretest was conducted as a case study including a survey and focus group. Second, the main study was conducted with 45 employees from two SAP customers in the US. We used internal consistency (by a Cronbach’s alpha) as the main measure for reliability and analyzed construct validity by exploratory principal factor analysis (or PFA). The results suggest a new categorization of a subset of items existing in the tool and provides empirical support for these new groups of factors. Since there are few validated tools to measure agile maturity, researchers cannot correlate quantitative agile maturity measurements to other variables in Software Engineering research and be confident that the results a...

Measuring Agility- A Validity Study on Tools Measuring The Agility Level of Software Development Teams

2015

Context: In the past two decades, an increasing number of software development teams have been transitioning to agile. As a result, a need has emerged for measuring how agile these teams are. To satisfy this need, many researchers have created their own agile measurement tools. However, none of the tools managed to provide a substantial solution. Objective: Many tools have been created for measuring the agility of software development teams, thus creating a saturation in the field. Three tools were selected in order to validate whether they will yield similar results. These tools were the Perceptive Agile Measurement (PAM), the Team Agility Assessment (TAA) and the Objectives Principles Strategies (OPS). Method: The surveys for the three tools were given to the four software development teams of Company A. The survey questions were grouped into agile practices which were checked for correlation in order to establish convergent validity. In addition, we checked whether the questions ...

Measuring agility in agile methodologies

2018

Agile software methodologies are among the most rational development patterns in global economic environment on which software development enterprises rely. They help software projects to face the dynamic changing business requirements of the customers. However, there is no standard tool for measuring agility and selecting the particular agile method for a particular project. The purpose of this paper is to review the existing tools for measuring agility in agile methodologies, as well as measuring agility in software development teams. This can help in decision-making processes regarding the adoption of an appropriate agile method for a particular project.

Applying an organisational agility maturity model

Journal of Organizational Change Management, 2018

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify the baseline model required to measure whole-of-organisation agility within a university information services division. The paper seeks to analyse the process of identifying and applying such a model.Design/methodology/approachThe qualitative methodology applied is that of a single case study. The organisation analysed was an Australian university’s information services division. A structured survey, based on Wendler (2014), was administered to all staff as part of a multi-phased approach, thus facilitating a triangulation process.FindingsThe current research has confirmed the applicability of Wendler’s model to the higher education information technology sector. Application of the model establishes not only a baseline agility maturity score across the whole-of-organisation but also provides granular scores based on organisational units. Triangulation of survey results is recommended to achieve a more in-depth perspective.Research limi...

Assessment of Agility in Software Organizations with a Web-Based Agility Assessment Tool

43rd Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, 2017

Agile software development approaches have emerged to overcome the inherent challenges of the traditional software development methodologies. With that in mind, they offer a set of simple yet effective practices based on the values and supporting principles of the Agile Manifesto. Today, more and more organizations are practicing Agile but transitioning to Agile is not as straightforward as it might seem. The benefits afforded by the agile values, principles and practices are not fully obtained and adapters struggle to become more mature; i.e. increase their Agility. For, adapters to address this problem, agility assessments have been designed to be aware of the situation of their transition and make sure that they are heading in the right direction. However, these assessments still require significant amount of time and effort to apply. To overcome this problem, we have developed a web-based agility assessment tool which is a part of an integrated agility assessment approach. The approach consists of a structured and comprehensive agility assessment model (AgilityMod), an exemplar agility assessment process and a web based agility assessment tool (AssessAgility). This research focuses on the final component of the approach: AssessAgility tool and presents a multiple case study that was conducted to evaluate tool’s capabilities in terms of providing guidance, automation and reducing the effort spent on the assessments.