Thesis: Quantitative Approach for Lightweight Agile Process Assessment

Yes, I have finally finished my Master's Thesis. And I must stress, finally. Some spell checking might still occur and I will print it next week. But I am quite pleased with what I current have. I am more than happy to receive any feedback and comments on my theses!

My thesis is about about our experiences at Plenware Oy on how to assess the agility of a process in a lightweight fashion, but still to be accurate and to support the Software Process Improvement (SPI) initiative. We came up with the idea that the assessment could be a set of predefined questions that could be easily answered by taking process metrics from a project management tool. The answers would be compared against reference answers and points would be given based on the assessment. Finally, a weighted sum gives the agility of the process.

The same approach could be implemented for other assessments, but our goal was to assess the agility of the process. The processes were in a transition phase to go towards agility and it was important to be able to measure the agility in a lightweight fashion.

I express my deepest sense of gratitude to my supervisor PhD Luka Milovanov at Plenware Oy for assisting in writing of this thesis.

Here's the abstract:

One focus in software development is to achieve high quality without loss of agility in the development process. In software engineering an agile development process is able to react to frequently changing customer requirements and also able to develop the software in small well tested increments. This is not an easy thing to do and will not emerge on its own, but requires well optimized and continuously improved software development processes. The quality of a process can be assessed by some external audits but they usually are heavyweight and costly processes. To measure the quality and follow the improvements in a process a lightweight assessment method is desired.

In this thesis I will look at Software Process Improvement (SPI) paradigm from the perspective of both Reference Process Models and the Experience Factory (EF) infrastructure. Then, I will present a quantitative lightweight process assessment method for agile projects. This method allows the assessment of a process in less than two hours. The method yields numeric results of the agility of a process in a lightweight fashion. I will conclude by stating that the work done in this thesis is only indicative of this kind of assessment for agile processes there is a need for further research. The results presented here result from the current need in Plenware Oy related to SPI evolvement.

Here's the PDF: Quantitative Approach for Lightweight Agile Process Assessment