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.
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.
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 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 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.