Towards a standardized questionnaire for measuring agility at team level

Abstract

Context: Twenty years after the publication of the agile manifesto, agility is becoming more and more popular in different contexts. Agile values are changing the way people work together and influence people’s mindset as well as the culture of organizations. Many organizations have understood that continuous improvement is based on measurement. Objective: The objective of this paper is to present how agility can be measured at the team level. For this reason, we will introduce our questionnaire for measuring agility, which is based on the agile values of the manifesto. Method: We developed a questionnaire comprising 36 items that measure the current state of a team’s agility in six dimensions (communicative, change affine, iterative, self-organized, product-driven and improvement-oriented). This questionnaire has been evaluated with respect to several expert reviews and in a case study. Results: The questionnaire provides a method for measuring the current state of agility, which takes the individual context of the team into account. Fur thermore, our research shows, that this technique enables the user to uncover dysfunctionalities in a team. Conclusion: Practitioners and organizations can use our questionnaire to opti mize collaboration within their teams in terms of agility. In particular, the value delivery of an organization can be increased by optimizing collaboration at the team level. The development of this questionnaire is a continuous learning process with the aim to develop a standardized questionnaire for measuring agility.