A Maturity Model for Scaling Agile Development

Although the agile software development approaches have gained wide acceptance in practice, the concerns regarding the scalability and integration of agile approaches in traditional system development organizations have remained. The difficulty of adopting agile practices increases when there is a need to scale these practices. Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has emerged as a solution to address some of these concerns. Despite few encouraging results of SAFe adoption, case studies indicate several challenges of SAFe adoption. Currently, there is a lack of a well-structured gradual approach for implementing and establishing SAFe. Before and during SAFe adoption, organizations require a uniform model for assessing the current state and progress, and for establishing a roadmap for the initiative. To address this need, we developed a maturity model for adopting agile and SAFe practices. Taking an existing agile maturity model as the basis, we extended the model with practices that are key to scaling agile practices for the SAFe. The model is developed and refined using a Delphi study. Subsequently, a case study was conducted in a large organization where the model was applied to assess the maturity level of the organization in adopting SAFe.