This post is part of a series on Measuring and Managing Agile Maturity. Click here to start at the beginning.
Planning Discipline
The cadence of regular software release milestones provides the means to conduct an objective assessment of project status at regular intervals. As planning has now turned to short term intervals (in iterations) and has been inverted from top down to bottom up (performed by the teams and based on the team’s actual known velocity), deliver y becomes increasingly predictable. The key practices that comprise this planning agility discipline and need to be assessed and measured are:
- Product Vision: Reveals where the project is going, and why it’s going there
- Planning Game: Combines whole-team experience to create achievable plans
- Release Planning: Provides a road map for reaching your destination
- Iteration Planning: Provides structure to the team’s daily activities
- Risk Management: Allows the team to meet long-term commitments
- Schedule Buffer: Allows the team to reliably deliver iteration results
Assessing and measuring the predictability of planning and meeting project milestones and deliverables is a true measure of software agility. Without this predictability, there is little or no chance for an organization to reap the benefits of business agility.
Tracking Discipline
The ability to proactively detect and strategically make course corrections in response to near real-time data is a business basic in software agility. Regular interaction with product stakeholders is the key enabler to make this measure -> assess -> adjust work f low possible. The key practices that comprise this tracking agility discipline and need to be assessed and measured are:
- Reporting: Helps reassure everyone that business objectives are being met
- Iteration Demos: Ensures team aligned with product stakeholder goals
- Root Cause Analysis: Identifies the underlying cause of team blockages
- Spike Solutions: Use of controlled experiments to provide information
- Retrospectives: Continual analysis and improvement of the entire process