Assessment of Agility in Software Organizations with a Web-Based Agility Assessment Tool* Onat Ege Adalﾕ Information Systems, TU/e Eindhoven, Netherlands o.e.adali@tue.nl Özden Özcan-Top Regulated Software Research Centre and Lero, DKIT Dundalk, Ireland ozden.ozcantop@dkit.ie Onur Demirörs Information Systems Dept., METU & UNSW Ankara, Turkey & Sydney, Australia demirors@metu.edu.tr Abstract— Agile software development approaches have emerged to overcome the inherent challenges of the traditional software development methodologies. With that in mind, they offer a set of simple yet effective practices based on the values and supporting principles of the Agile Manifesto. Today, more and more organizations are practicing Agile but transitioning to Agile is not as straightforward as it might seem. The benefits afforded by the agile values, principles and practices are not fully obtained and adapters struggle to become more mature; i.e. increase their Agility. For, adapters to address this problem, agility assessments have been designed to be aware of the situation of their transition and make sure that they are heading in the right direction. However, these assessments still require significant amount of time and effort to apply. To overcome this problem, we have developed a web-based agility assessment tool which is a part of an integrated agility assessment approach. The approach consists of a structured and comprehensive agility assessment model (AgilityMod), an exemplar agility assessment process and a web based agility assessment tool (AssessAgility). This research focuses on the final component of the approach: AssessAgility tool and presents a multiple case study that was conducted to evaluate tool’s capabilities in terms of providing guidance, automation and reducing the effort spent on the assessments. Keywords—agility assessment; agile software development; tool; automated; web-based I. INTRODUCTION According to the 10 th Annual State of the Agile Survey [1] 95% of the total of 3880 respondents said that their organizations practice “Agile” in software development. The survey also states that “agile software development has grown increasingly popular over the last decade”. Agile Methods offer a set of practices based on the four Agile values and twelve supporting principles defined in the Agile Manifesto [2] and they provide the flexibility to adapt these principles and practices, based on the culture, values, and needs of an organization or a team [3]. However, agile adaptation within an organization is not easy and straightforward. The challenges in relation to adaptation include misinterpretation of Agile concepts, focusing only on implementing agile practices while ignoring agile values and principles (doing agile vs being agile), and sticking to implementing a not well suited practice rather than quickly trying, observing and discarding that practice and performing the adaptation in a continuous way. In addition to these, “Agile” could be used as an excuse for being undisciplined. Agility assessment, which is a crucial instrument to understand the status of an adapted Agile Method in an organization, enable adopters to find out if the applied methodology has met its intended purpose and to determine improvement areas for improved agility. The approach we propose for agility assessment include three components: a structured and method-independent agility assessment reference model (AgilityMod) [4], an exemplar agility assessment process having the definitions and guidance to conduct assessments with AgilityMod and a tool (AssessAgility) that automates and guides the assessment process based on the exemplar assessment process. In this study, we focus on presenting the third component of the approach; the web based agility assessment tool. We have performed a multiple case study to evaluate the tool’s capabilities in terms of providing guidance, automation and reducing the effort spent on the assessments. The AssessAgility tool has been developed to improve the efficiency in agility assessments performed with AgilityMod with its superior functions compared to existing agility assessment tools. The tool supported approach proposed in this study is able to provide guidance and automation in planning, conducting, and reporting stages. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: In Section II, we present the study that was performed to specify and evaluate the existing agility assessment tools, the minimum criteria that should be in an assessment tool and related research on agility assessment. In Section III, the AssessAgility: Web Based Agility Assessment Tool is presented. In section IV, we present the multiple case study that we have conducted to evaluate our * This research is partially supported by Science Foundation Ireland Research Centres Programme, through Lero - the Irish Software Research Centre (http://www.lero.ie), grant 10/CE/I1855 & 13/RC/2094 and partially supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBøTAK), grant number 113E528. 2017 43rd Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications 978-1-5386-2141-7/17 $31.00 © 2017 IEEE DOI 10.1109/SEAA.2017.61 88