Succeeding with Agile

Comparative Agility Assessment

A handful of years ago, some of my clients began to ask me, “How are we doing?” My replies were always something like, “You’re doing pretty well at pair programming, and I like how teams have shifted from writing requirements documents to talking about user stories. But teams really haven’t embraced the idea of automated testing yet, and that’s where we need to focus most.” But this wasn’t the type of answer they wanted; they wanted to know, “How are we doing compared to our competition?”

At first this question bothered me. It doesn’t matter how your competitors are doing at agile, I reasoned. If you’re not perfect yet, keep improving. It took me awhile, but I eventually realized the flaws in my thinking. A business ...