Agile Assessment

Many organisations and teams that adopt Agile come to the point where knowing how agile they are becomes an important question. It’s especially important when first stages of Agile transformation prove to be successful, teams finally work at a sustainable pace and it becomes more difficult to identify obvious areas for further improvements.

There are many agile assessments available (please refer to a great blog post by Ben Linders), but none of them fit to my needs 😉 and therefore I ended up creating my own evaluation. It’s grounded on an assessment presented by Dean Leffingwell in Scaling Software Agility:Best Practices for Large Enterprises, but I made several adjustments based on my experience from working with various Agile teams and projects.

The assessment is a great input for the team to improve. Moreover, if you have more Agile teams working together, the assessment can be a vital source of information for Scrum Masters and management that should enable them to work on organisation-level impediments preventing the teams from working even more effectively.

The assessment consists of 66 statements/questions grouped in 7 areas: product ownership, agile process, team, quality, engineering practices, fun & learning and integration. Every team member should assess each statement using a scale from 1 (the worst) to 5 (the best). As a result, you get an average assessment of each statement for the whole team and resulting evaluation for each area. The latter is used to plot a Radar Diagram that graphically presents the results.

Please be aware that there is no single, correct interpretation of the assessment’s results. It’s something that very depends on your organisation, maturity of the team and people you’re working with. Furthermore, it’s not final values that matter the most, but their relative comparison and how they change over time (progress/improvement).

Feel free to download the assessment and adjust it to your needs. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you think that some changes should be implemented.

 Download the Agile Assessment spreadsheet