Despite the significant impact that Agile methodology has on project management, only some entrepreneurs understand how to evaluate the effectiveness of an Agile model when applied to a project.
In fact, the achievement of business objectives is the key to project success. Therefore, agile software development environments necessitate a process improvement model for software.
To maximize the productivity of project management, this blog aims to propose and evaluate the Agile Maturity Model to identify agile practices for each level and list out specific goals per phase.
1. What is an Agile Maturity Model?
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The Agile Maturity Model is designed to improve and enhance the agile software development methodology and boost up the agile principles and objectives like lower cost, customer satisfaction, software quality, etc. This high-level view of the model shows how agile software development practices mature from an initial or ad-hoc level to a continuously improving level based on agile principles and practices. In this model, each level has a pre-defined goal to help practitioners or organizations focus on their improvement activities. To follow, let’s have a look at the 5 basic levels of the Agile Maturity Model.
2. 5 Levels of the Agile Maturity Model
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Level 1: Initial Level
At this level, the practices or processes for making software are very simple and may not be repeatable. Organizations don't usually provide a stable environment to develop. Level 1 company doesn't have a set process for making software in an agile way. At this level, the main problems are overtime, schedule changes, communication, software quality, and development cost.
These companies have their own ways of operation and depend on individuals rather than the whole team. In the traditional software process, success at this level depends on certain people in the organization and can't be repeated unless the same people are assigned to the next project.
Level 2: Explored
Level 2 practices are better organized and more complete than level 1 practices. The software development process ran more smoothly for organizations with level 2 capability than for those with level 1.
The biggest problem, along with keeping staff, is communication, coding, and integration.
Technically, level 2 companies had trouble with communication (how they talked to each other), coding standards, overtime, and making sure customers were happy.
These are the goals for this level:
• Plan the project;
• Improve agile requirements engineering;
• Focus on the customer and other stakeholders.
• Improve planning, value, and collaboration practices
In general, companies at this level have set up project planning, requirements engineering, and on-site customer-related practices to keep track of project schedules, plans, requirements, costs, and functionality.
At level 2, the agile maturity model is supposed to help developers and customers find and fix problems with planning, requirements engineering, and onsite customer service by learning from the successes and failures of past projects. This is achieved by an assessment of the current process and identifying where weakness lie will help the development team gain a general overview and allow them to address any planning or requirements issues associated with individual projects.
Level 3: Defined Level (Customer satisfaction, Software quality, and development practices)
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Level 3 means that practices related to customer relationship management, frequent deliveries, pair agile maturity modeling, communication, coding, testing, and software quality are emphasized. These are the goals for this level:
• Satisfaction of customers
• Improvement of communication
• Quality of software
• Improvement of coding practices and coding standards
At this level, the relationship with the customer is very well kept up. Companies make sure that their employees have a better understanding of test-driven development for coding and testing, pair agile maturity modeling, and improve how often they can deliver software and how it's coded.
Level 3 companies had more control over their technical practices like coding and testing. They also paid more attention to their customer relationship management practices. However, they didn't make much progress in managing their people practices. They kept saying that there were problems with managing work hours or overtime at a pace that was good for the development team and the project. At this level, there is no structured assessment of risk. Also, code optimizations are not taken into account at all.
At level 3, most technical problems have been solved, but organizational problems, such as team problems, have not.
At level 3, the agile maturity model is supposed to help developers find and fix problems with customer relationships, coding, testing, putting out new versions often, and coding standards. This is done by taking a look at how things are done now and figuring out where they are weak.
Level 4: Improved (People orientation and project management Practices)
At this level, companies are able to collect detailed measurements of the software development process or practices and the quality of the products. The software development practices and the products can be understood and controlled using detailed measurements.
The improved level of the agile maturity model is more about the development team than the product itself. It has to do with project management, working hours, self-organizing teams, and risk assessment. This is something that the team does that the customer doesn't see directly. Level 4 means that risk and respect for the team that will build the system are looked at more actively and must be done. This level's goals are
• Project management
• Risk assessment
• No overtime
• Simplicity
Level 4, which is called the "improved" level, has been practiced for focusing on people and managing projects. This level focuses on the team taking responsibility instead of being given it. The team should think about doing the simplest thing that might work, work smart instead of hard, and be able to organize itself.
At level 4, the agile maturity model is meant to help developers or managers respect their coworkers or other people who are working on the project, find and fix problems at the team's pace, and let the team organize itself. This is done by taking a look at how things are done now and figuring out where they are weak.
Level 5: Mature level (practices for managing performance and preventing mistakes).
At this level, companies keep improving their processes by getting quantitative feedback from the process and testing new ideas and technologies. Companies that want to move from level 4 to level 5 should have a lot of metric data to help them keep track of how the process is going.
The mature level of the agile maturity model takes into account how happy customers and developers are. Here, we decided to look at both the software process and the result that the team got. These are the goals for this level:
• Improving the context
• Managing uncertainty
• Tuning project performance
• Preventing mistakes
Final thoughts:
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