The Art of Agile Development

Assess Your Agility

Suppose you’ve been using XP for a few months. How can you tell if you’re doing it properly? The ultimate measure is the success of your project, but you may wish to review and assess your approach to XP as well.

To help you do this, I’ve created a quiz that focuses on five important aspects of agile development. It explores results rather than specific practices, so you can score well even after customizing XP to your situation. If you aren’t using XP at all, you can also use this quiz to assess your current approach.

This quiz assesses typical sources of risk. Your goal should be to achieve the maximum score in each category—which is well within the grasp of experienced XP teams. Any score less than the maximum indicates risk, and an opportunity for improvement.

To take the quiz, answer the following questions and enter your scores on a photocopy of the blank radar diagram (Figure 4-2). Don’t give partial credit for any question, and if you aren’t sure of the answer, give yourself zero points. The result should look something like Figure 4-1. The score of the lowest spoke identifies your risk, as follows:

• 75 points or less: immediate improvement required (red)

• 75 to 96 points: improvement necessary (yellow)

• 97, 98, or 99: improvement possible (green)

• 100: no further improvement needed

Figure 4-1. Example assessment

Note

The point values for each answer come from an algorithm ...