Agile is a journey where you learn and improve continuously. Agile Self-assessments help teams to explore where they are and decide on the next steps to increase their agility.
If you want to become more Agile and Lean, my recommendation is to frequently ask yourself the following 3 questions:
- How Agile and Lean are you already?
- Where do you want to become more Agile and Lean? And why?
- What can you do to make the next step?
Agile Self-assessments help you to ask these questions and travel your agile journey.
The Agile Self-Assessment Game
The Agile Self-Assessment Game is used by teams and organizations to self-assess their agility. Playing the game enables teams to reflect on their own team interworking and agree upon the next steps for their agile journey. With this game, they discover how agile they are and what they can do to increase their agility to deliver more value to their customers and stakeholders.
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- Digital Downloads, eBooks, Packages
El Juego de Autoevaluación Ágil – Libro y cartas
- €8.99 – €26.79 (Excl. VAT)
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- Digital Downloads, Packages
Agile Zelfevaluatie Kaarten & Uitbreidingssets – Nederlands
- €1.99 – €9.99 (Excl. VAT)
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Also available in French, German, Czech, and Polish, see Agile Coaching Tools.
This game, developed by Ben Linders, has been played at the XP Days Benelux 2016, Oefeningen voor Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives, and at many other conferences and meetups. I also use it for in-house self-assessments with my clients and in my workshops, masterclasses and training, see Assessing your Agility.
Making Agile Work for You
If your agile transformation is not delivering the expected results or if you are doing agile and want to deliver more value to your customers and stakeholders, then join my workshop Making Agile Work for You.
In this workshop, you will learn how to apply agile practices to develop the right products, deliver faster, increase quality, and become a happy high-performing team!
Tools and Checklists for agile self-assessments
The following tools and checklists are known to me (90++). They can help you to do a kind of startup/health check or readiness/maturity assessment to determine how agile or lean you are.
Partner/sponsored tools:
- Lean Agile Intelligence – Optimizing the Flow of Feedback
Note: I’m an affiliate for the above tools, if you visit their website via the above links and sign up then I will receive a commission.
- My Agile Self-Assessment Game and my book The Agile Self-assessment Game
- The Scrum Checklist from Henrik Kniberg
- 42 point test: How Agile are You by Kelly Waters
- Questions for Transitioning to Agile from Johanna Rothman
- Agile Adoption Framework by Ahmed Sidky
- Team Barometer by Jimmy Janlén
- Scrum Checklist by Boris Gloger
- Corporate Agile 10-point checklist by Elena Yatzeck
- Joe’s Unofficial Scrum Checklist by Joe Little
- Lean-Agile Roadmap by NetObjectives (link is broken, unsure if this is still available)
- ScrumButt Test aka the Nokia Test by Jeff Sutherland
- How to Measure Team Agility by Len Lagestee
- Scrum Assessment Series by David Hawks
- Agile Maturity Self Assessment by Robbie Mac Iver
- Enterprise Agility Maturity Matrix by Eliassen Group
- Enterprise Agile Practice Assessment Tool (paid services) by DrAgile
- Comparative Agility by Mike Cohn and Kenny Rubin
- Open Assessments from scrum.org
- Readiness & Fit Analysis from the Software Engineering Institute by Suzanne Miller
- Agile Journey Index by Bill Krebs
- Seven Questions to Ask to Determine if Your Organization is Agile Ready from PMI Austin
- An Organizational Transformation Checklist by Michael Sahota
- Agile Maturity Matrix in JIRA by Atlassian
- Assessing your Client’s Agility by Marcel Britsch
- Borland Agile Assessment
- Agile Self Assessment by Cape Project Management
- Agile Maturity Model (AMM) by Chetankumar Patel and Muthu Ramachandran
- Test your Organisation’s Agile Credentials by Storm-Consulting
- Depth of Kanban by Christophe Achouiantz
- Agile Essentials (card game) by Ivar Jacobson International
- IBM DevOps Practices Self Assessment
- Agile team evaluation by Eric Gunnerson
- Ready for Agile Part 1 and Part 2 by Salah Elleithy (based on research by Ahmed Sidky)
- Squad Health Check model from Spotify / Henrik Kniberg
- Assessing the level of Agility by Yuval Yeret
- Assess your Agility by James Shore
- Test Maturity card game by Joep Schuurkes and Huib Schoots
- AgilityHealth Radar (paid service)
- Rojooms How Deep is your Agile? by Shirly Ronen-Harel
- Agile 3R Model of Maturity Assessment by Phani Thimmapuram
- Cargo Cult Agile Checklist by Age of Product
- Success Factors for Self-Assessment of Teams by Angelika Drach, Christoph Mathis & Jens Coldewey
- Your Path through Agile Fluency by Diana Larsen and James Shore & Finding Agile That’s Fit-for-Purpose by Diana Larsen
- The InfoQ Minibook Scrum Hard Facts: Roles. Artifacts. All meetings provides a Scrum checklist
- The InfoQ minibook An Agile Adoption and Transformation Survival Guide includes a checklist for change agents
- Agile Assessments by LeadingAgile
- Agile Maturity Self-Assessment Survey by Eduardo Ribeiro
- Implementing Lean Software Development (Poppendieck)
- Xebia essentials (free app)
- XebiaLabs DevOps Self-Assessment
- Teammetrics by Christiaan Verwijs
- Agile Assessment by Piotr Nowinski
- Assess your agile engineering practices by Corinna Baldauf
- Agile Maturity Model by Jez Humble and Rolf Russell for Thoughtworks
- Maturity Assessment Model for Scrum Teams by Marmamula Prashanth Kumar
- The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code by Joel Spolsky
- Back-of-a-Napkin Agile Assessment by Elisabeth Hendrickson
- Are you really agile? by People10
- Process Goals from Disciplined Agile (submitted by Scott W.Ambler)
- Scrum Master Checklist by Michael James
- Top 20 self assessment questions by Gene Gendel
- Project Approach Questionaire by Agile Business Consortium
- Visual Management Self-Assessment by Ben Hogan (free subscription required)
- Continuous Delivery Maturity Checklist by DZone
- The Agendashift™ values-based delivery assessment by Mike Burrows (commercial service with free mini edition)
- Retropoly by Sorin Sfirlogea and Florian Georgescu
- How Agile Are You? by Mark Balbes
- Quick self-assessment of your organization’s agility by Signet / Charles Parry
- Agile Software Development Complete Self-Assessment (paid service)
- DevOps Self-Assessment by Microsoft in collaboration with DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) – Registration required
- Health Monitors from the Atlassian Team Playbook
- Kanban Service Maturity Assessment by Gerard Chiva
- [email protected] game by Peter Antman and Christian Vikström
- Agile Alert by H&Z – Assessment tool no longer available
- Team Agility Self Assessment by Yodiz
- SAFe Team Agility Self-Assessment by Scaled Agile
- Agile Software Product Line Automotive – Assessment Model (aspla) by Philipp Hohl
- Business Agility Manifesto – Diagnostics by Roger T. Burlton, Ronald G. Ross & John A. Zachman
- Agile Assessment by AgileTrailblazers (paid service)
- Enterprise Business Agility Maturity Assessment by Eduardo Ribeiro
- Measure.team by Kelly Albrecht
- Detecting Agile BS by US Department of Defense (DoD)
- Skills Self-Assessments by BPMInstitute.org
- Agile Adoption Interview by PLADcloud
- Agility Assessment by RefineM
- Lean-Agile Coach self-assessment radars by Luca Minudel
- Scrum master self-assessment kit by SmHarter
- How Agile are you? A 50 Point Test by Finite
- Agile Leadership Game by Agile Consortium
- My favorite Agile Self-Assessment for Teams by Anja Stiedl
- Scrum Team Survey by The Liberators
- New Peerview by Bernhard Sterchi and Rahel Lüthy
- New Agile Excellerate by Leanergy Consulting
- New Comprehensive Agility Measurement Tool (CAMT) by Ameya S. Erande and Alok K. Verma
- New Five Key Numbers to Gauge your Agile Engineering Efforts by Jeff Nielsen
- New Karlskrona test by Mark Seuffert
- New Agile Assessment by digital.ai
If you want to become agile in an agile way, and would like some support on applying any combination of these tools, see my services / diensten, and feel free to contact me!
Nederlandstalige assessments
- Agile Zelfevaluatiekaarten door Ben Linders
- Agile Self Assessment door Mike Hoogveld/Nyenrode Business University (Nederlandstalig)
Autoevaluación en español
- New Mi Juego de autoevaluación ágil by Ben Linders
- New Lista de Chequeo Scrum por Henrik Kniberg traducido por Lucho Salazar
Background information on Agile Self-Assessments
The articles and books mentioned below can help you to do agile self-assessment or to develop your own assessment:
- How Agile Are You? on LinkedIn
- My book The Agile Self-assessment Game
- Agile Addresses “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” from InfoQ
- Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model
- Personality types: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and DISC assessment
- Team Dynamics: Satir Change Model, Human Dynamics and Tuckman’s Stages of Team Formation
- Measuring and managing agile maturity (tag: measurement) by Brad Murphy
- Something agile: new ideas for agile implementation by Jan Gentsch
- A List of Agility Tests by David Koontz
- Agendashift by Mike Burrows
- Agile Managen and Agile Management by Mike Hoogveld
- Are You Agile? An Assessment Can Tell You by Joel Bancroft-Connors
- Model for Team Effectiveness based on research by Richard Hackman, described in Leading Teams
- 7 vragen om te kijken hoe agile men is op Sigma
- Agile Assessment Guide – Best Practices for Agile Adoption and Implementation by US Government Accountability Office (GAO)
- A Catalogue of Agile Smells for Agility Assessment by Ulisses Telemaco, Toacy Oliveira, Paulo Alencar, and Don Cowan
- An Assessment of Modern Agile Assessment Tools by Anthony Mersino
- New Agile Assessment Methods: Current State of the Art by Ulisses Telemaco, Paulo Alencar, Donald D Cowan, Toacy C Oliveira
- New Assessing Agile Methods: Investigating Adequacy, Capability, and Effectiveness by Shvetha Soundararajan
- New Perceptive agile measurement: New instruments forquantitative studies in the pursuit of the social-psychological effect of agile practices by Chaehan So and Wolfgang Scholl
Recommended books
If you want to use agile self-assessments to help your teams and organization improve, here are some books that I highly recommend.
How about the CMMI for Agile Self-Assessments?
I didn’t mention the CMMI in the list above, although it is a model that is clearly meant to assess organizations. And you can self-assess with the CMMI using class C assessments, I did that many times myself.
My feeling is that the CMMI is not very helpful when it comes to assessing agility or implementing agile (blogged on that long time ago in CMMI V1.3 Agile). Then again, a good level 5 organization that has a deep understanding of the processes and practices that they use and is able to adapt to changing circumstances would be an organization with high agility; Maturity, capability, and agility, can certainly co-exist!
Missing an agile self-assessment checklist or tool
Do you use an agile checklist or tool that is not mentioned on the list? Or know a related article that helps to do agile self-assessment? Please send me a link with a short motivation why you think it should be added to the list. Thanks!
Increasing your Agility
Feel free to contact me if you want to play the Agile Self-assessment game to assess your agility or learn more about agile self-assessments, and improving your agility.
+31 6 2901 3863
[email protected]
@BenLinders
Ben Linders
Ben Linders Advies
Tilburg, The Netherlands
(last updated on February 3, 2022)
Hi Ben,
this is an excellent resource! Thanks so much.
I am wondering though – are all these questionnaires and tools too much inward looking? Yes, we surely need to assess a team’s agility, but I believe there are external factors, i.e. the wider organisation, which, if not supportive of Agile will not allow a project to succeed in Agile fashion. So yes, we need to know about whether a team collaborates, uses velocity and does their standups, and all that ‘correctly’ but I believe these things are relatively ‘easy’ to get control.
What is far harder to change, in many cases it is not possible to change at all, is the attitude of a client’s organisation or other factors in the project environment.
So I am thinking of requesting every new client to fill out a questionnaire so we can assess whether the project ‘environment’ is actually supportive to Agile or whether the most agile team would not be able to succeed in that specific context.
What do you think, does this make sense or am I overthinking?
I’ve put the Questionnaire here, would be interesting to hear your thoughts.
http://www.thedigitalbusinessanalyst.co.uk/2014/07/Agile-Questionnaire.html
marcel
Thanks for your comment. I agree that most questionnaires focus inward, looking at what the team is doing or could do. Taking a systems approach we also need to look at the context as you mentioned. Are the conditions there for teams to work agile? Any barriers that need to be removed? Can we have a good collaboration between the teams and their stakeholders? What can they do to increase agility?
Your questionnaire can be helpful to explore the system and address issues that could hamper agile adoption, thanks for sharing it! I’ve also added it to the list of questionnaires.
what a great comprehensive list!
you can also add – http://www.slideshare.net/yyeret/leanagile-depth-assessment
See this for a guide how we use it
http://yuvalyeret.com/2014/06/20/return-of-the-improvement/
Great addition, thanks Yuval!
Great self-assessments checklist! You can also add Shippable’s DevOps playbook to the list since it shows how to do DevOps the right way. https://www.shippable.com/devops-playbook.html.
You can easily assess your DevOps efforts.
How can someone access this checklist? Do you need to buy a license?
This is public. Anybody can view and assess their DevOps efforts.