Agility Measurements Mismatch: A Validation Study on Three Agile Team Assessments in Software Engineering
This work addresses the problem of inconsistent agile measurement tools for software engineering teams, but it is incremental as it validates existing tools rather than introducing new methods.
The study validated three agile team assessment tools in software engineering by testing them on 30 teams and found that they did not yield similar results, with few and low correlations and mismatched answers for identical questions, concluding that the field of measuring agility is immature.
Many tools have been created for measuring the agility of software teams, thus creating a saturation in the field. Three agile measurement tools were selected in order to validate whether they yield sim-ilar results. The surveys of the tools were given to teams in Company A (N = 30). The questions were grouped into agile practices which were checked for correlation in order to establish convergent validity. In addition, we checked whether the questions identified to be the same among the tools would be given the same replies by the respondents. We could not establish convergent validity since the correlations of the data gathered were very few and low. In addition, the questions which were identified to have the same meaning among the tools did not have the same answers from the respondents. We conclude that the area of measuring agility is still immature and more work needs to be done. Not all tools are applicable to every team but they should be selected on the basis of how a team has transitioned to agile.