Assessing an Organization's Capability to Effectively Implement Its Selected Agile Method(s): An Objectives, Principles, Strategies Approach

Agile methods provide an organization or a team with 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, i.e. the 'goodness' of that method, should be demonstrable. Existing agile assessment approaches focus on comparative analyses, or are limited in scope and application. In this research, we present a systematic, comprehensive approach to assessing 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 employ the Objectives, Principles and Strategies (OPS) Framework to guide our assessment process. The Framework (a) specifies objectives of the agile philosophy, (b) identifies principles that support the objectives, (c) designates strategies that implement the principles, (d) defines linkages that relate objectives to principles, and principles to strategies, and (e) prescribes indicators for assessing the extent to which an organization supports the implementation and effectiveness of those strategies. The propagation of indicator values along the linkages provides a multi-level assessment view of the agile method. In this paper, we discuss our assessment approach and substantiation results.