Friday, April 24, 2009

An Agile Process Maturity Model

I've begun reporting out the June 15 special report on Agile Development, and just got off the phone with IBM's Scott Ambler. He indicated the company has created an Agile Process Maturity Model, which will be detailed in a white paper due out in the next week or so. The maturity model defines three levels of agile process maturity. The lowest level is implementation by small, co-located teams using point tools for such tasks as continuous integration and testing, perhaps using Scrum or XP for collaboration. The next level demonstrates a more disciplined, full lifecycle approach and adds a level of governance. The third level is what Ambler called "disciplined agile at scale." Some critics have called this a mythical level, but Ambler details this in a very recent blog post. This links to a page on IBM's developerworks site, which had been down for maintenance, but check back.

Lining up more interviews now for the rest of this report.

-- David

1 comment:

Derek Neighbors said...

I am not sure how "complexity" associates to "maturity" in agile. I think that you could have a small co-located team that does "agile" better than a team that is doing agile in 20 time zones, with a bunch of "governance".

I think this is a mis-guided attempt to classify "agile" maturity by complexity rather than by the principles in the manifesto itself.