Assessing Agile Effectiveness and the Agile 2010 Conference
Posted on Wed, Aug 04, 2010
As we've discussed previously, it is not only possible but critical that you measure your software development and engineering practices in terms of their effectiveness. Why? Because increased competition and evolving business models in the software industry demand faster time to market without cutting corners on quality. Maintaining quality standards while accelerating software production requires that you continually evaluate what you're doing, introduce innovations and process improvements so that you can do it better, and measure the results to make sure you've made a difference.
Many turn to Agile methodologies in order to address the issue of engineering effectiveness and for good reason since Agile techniques promise to "deliver software faster, in better quality, and at a lower cost." However, in order to maximize the benefits, it's important that you are applying Agile methods to the right type of development project in the right way.
In Ness's Software Product Labs we've been using an Adaptive Agile approach for years and based on our experience with dozens of Agile transitions, we have created a four phase assessment to help organizations understand what they need to do in order to successfully apply Agile methods to their specific business context or improve already existing Agile implementations.
The phases of our assessment consist of the following:
- Explore - In which we look at business suitability, perform a gap analysis, and create an appropriate action plan.
- Adopt - In which, starting with the organization's current state, we develop an Agile process framework outlining the tools, roles, governance structure, and metrics necessary for the creation of an Agile team and operating environment.
- Review - In which we focus on continuous improvement by building a dashboard of standardized and custom metrics allowing us to report on team health, product management issues, development, and test engineering.
- Reinvent - This phase aims at helping those organizations that are “Agile veterans" hit maturity milestones on a consistent basis by applying a measured approach to ongoing Agile adoption.
If you'd like to learn more about our Agile Assessment, we'll be talking about it at Agile 2010 in Orlando next week. Hope to see you there.
Of course, you can always contact us to talk about the assessment or anything else we might do for you!
Image Source: Improve It.
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