Comparative Agility was initiated in mid-2007 by Kenny Rubin and Mike Cohn. An initial set of ~125 questions was developed based on their years of agile experience.  By August 2008, over 275 practitioners had completed the Comparative Agility survey.

As of January 2010, almost 1,000 practitioners have taken the Comparative Agility survey. Any agile practitioner can visit www.comparativeagility.com and in exchange for investing his or her time to complete the survey, can receive a free report that compares his survey results to the complete industry dataset.  Alternatively, team members can individually take the survey (using a team-specific survey URL) and have their results aggregated together to provide a team-based comparison against some or all of the remaining dataset. Both of these approaches are in common use today.

Community Input
After two years of experience and feedback using Comparative Agility we have begun improving the survey. Laurie Williams, Ph.D., has joined the project and will be leading this effort. Dr. Williams is an associate professor of computer science at North Carolina State University and is uniquely qualified for this role because of her experience developing prior team-based agility assessments. A popular keynote speaker at agile conferences, Dr. Williams is well-known for her Pair Programming Illuminated book.

Our next step is to engage the agile community in a review of the latest version of the survey questions.  To support this effort, we have created a special “feedback” version of the survey that can be found at: http://feedback.comparativeagility.com/. If you are interested in participating in the community review process, please go to the site, review the questions and provide us with your feedback.

The idea is that all interested agile practitioners can review the revised questions and submit feedback (anonymously if desired) such as: “I suggest you change this question in the following way…,” or “I don’t see the value of this question at all, so I suggest you drop it,” or “I think there is an important question that you don’t currently ask, and it is…”

Our goal, of course, is to tap into the collective wisdom of the agile community to ensure that the best possible survey is produced.  Based on the community revisions we will update www.comparativeagility.com to host the revised survey and, when appropriate and statistically valid, retain historical Comparative Agility data in the future dataset.

The feedback we have received over the past two years regarding the Comparative Agility instrument has been very encouraging and we look forward to working with the Agile community to make it even better!

About the Authors
Kenny Rubin provides Agile and Scrum-related training and coaching.  He has succeeded as a developer, product owner, and ScrumMaster on numerous Agile and  Scrum development projects. Also, he has held numerous executive management  roles including: CEO, COO, VP of Engineering, VP of Product Management and VP  of Professional Services.  Kenny is a Certified Scrum Trainer and has  trained over 14,000 people on Agile/Scrum, Smalltalk development, managing  object-oriented projects, and transition management.  He has coached over  200 companies ranging from startups to Fortune 10. Kenny is the former  Managing Director of the Scrum Alliance, a 70,000 member organization focused  on the world-wide adoption of Scrum.

Laurie Williams is an associate professor of computer science at North Carolina State University and an agile trainer and coach.  Laurie has conducted a number of empirical studies analyzing the cost and benefits of agile methods and practices of industrial teams including IBM, Sabre Airlines Solutions, Tekelec, and Microsoft.  Laurie has also worked for IBM for nine years prior to returning to academia.   She is the co-author of Pair Programming Illuminated and a co-editor of Extreme Programming Perspectives.

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