How Agile Are you? Discussing Maturity Levels of Agile Maturity Models

With the emergence of agile software development methods, new approaches for determining agile maturity have become necessary. Other than for traditional maturity and capability models like CMMI and ISO/IEC 15504, the field of agile maturity models is not yet settled. Even worse, a common understanding regarding agility in general and the levels of agility in particular is missing. The paper at hand aims to shed light on the field of agile maturity models with a particular focus on maturity levels, their definition, and their evaluation and computation. We conducted a systematic literature review to extract maturity levels and provide an initial harmonization of the levels found. Our findings from analyzing 19 agile maturity models show that there is yet no agreement with regard to the maturity levels. In total, 69 maturity levels have been analyzed for harmonization opportunities. Two major dimensions of maturity levels of agile maturity models could be identified: (1) team-related and (2) general maturity, which is comparable to standard approaches. However, the procedures to assess organizations and processes, if at all present, are to a large extent focused on persons and their personal opinion, which paves the way for future research, e.g., in terms of developing measurement systems for assessing agile maturity.