Assessing Product Development Agility

Agile software development grew out of a variety of alternative software development methods that shared a common set of values and principles. After two decades with these alternative methods, agile software development remains loosely defined, but has been widely accepted. This acceptance has gained the attention of other fields with discussions of applying agile to their work, for example agile systems engineering and agile program management. However, within the larger field of product development, agility was defined in terms of software development, both in practice and in principle. This chapter focuses on a set of general agile characteristics derived from the agile values and principles embraced by many software developers. This set of characteristics provides a basis for (a) assessing difficulties in software development projects employing agile practices, (b) applying concepts of agility to other disciplines beyond software development, and (c) measuring agility. In addition to deriving general agile characteristics, this chapter relates two stories of agile methods adoption that illustrate both the need for and the utility of general agile characteristics.