Development of a questionnaire for software development companies for internal assessment of the agile maturity level

Abstract

This article published in the journal Gruppe Interaktion Organisation (GIO) presents the development and validation of a questionnaire to determine the agile maturity level of a software company based on the assessment of its employees. Agility has become a major issue for many companies, especially in the software field. The reasons for this can be found in the high volatility of the markets, the worldwide progressing digitalization, the global networking of value chains and the pressure to shorten innovation cycles. These developments can no longer be accommodated by conventional cascading development methods, so that they are increasingly replaced by agile approaches. Agile procedures make it possible to process complex requirements and to react flexibly to changes. Despite their advantages, the implementation of agile principles confronts many companies with major challenges. Decisive for the success of agility is not only the introduction of certain methods and techniques, but especially their perception and subjective evaluation by the employees. In order to capture subjective views and judgments, this article presents a questionnaire that can be filled in by employees and that represents the internally perceived level of agile maturity of the company. Since it can be used across departments and hierarchy levels, it provides a differentiated picture of shared values but also of differences in the workforce. Based on this picture, measures can be designed that further advance the agility of the company. The requirements for the questionnaire were derived from publications on agile maturity models and the Agile Manifesto. Based on this, an item pool of initially 128 items was generated. After interviews with six experts, this pool was reduced to 53 items. In an online survey, these 53 items were answered by 200 people on a 7-point Likert scale. A Principal Component Analysis with Varimax rotation resulted in a five-dimensional version with 26 items that can be used for an internal assessment of the degree of agile maturity. Future work will focus on further optimizing the instrument.