Many organizations aspire to adopt agile processes to take advantage of the numerous benefits that they offer to an organization. Those benefits include, but are not limited to, quicker return on investment, better software quality, and higher customer satisfaction. To date, however, there is no structured process (at least that is published in the public domain) that guides organizations in adopting agile practices. To address this situation, we present the agile adoption framework and the innovative approach we have used to implement it. The framework consists of two components: an agile measurement index, and a four-stage process, that together guide and assist the agile adoption efforts of organizations. More specifically, the Sidky Agile Measurement Index (SAMI) encompasses five agile levels that are used to identify the agile potential of projects and organizations. The four-stage process, on the other hand, helps determine (a) whether or not organizations are ready for agile adoption, and (b) guided by their potential, what set of agile practices can and should be introduced. To help substantiate the "goodness" of the Agile Adoption Framework, we presented it to various members of the agile community, and elicited responses through questionnaires. The results of that substantiation effort are encouraging, and are also presented in this paper.

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Despite advancements in requirements generation models, methods and tools, low quality requirements are still being produced. One potential avenue for addressing this problem is to provide the requirements engineer with an interactive environment that leads (or guides) him/her through a structured set of integrated activities that foster "good" quality requirements. While that is our ultimate goal, a necessary first step in developing such an environment is to create a formal specification mechanism for characterizing the structure, process flow and activities inherent to the requirements generation process. In turn, such specifications can serve as a basis for developing an interactive environment supporting requirements engineering.Reflecting the above need, we have developed a markup language, the Requirements Generation Markup Language (RGML), which can be used to characterize a requirements generation process.The RGML can describe process structure, flow of control, and individual activities. Within activities, the RGML supports the characterization of application instantiation, the use of templates and the production of artifacts. The RGML can also describe temporal control within a process as well as conditional expressions that control if and when various activity scenarios will be executed. The language is expressively powerful, yet flexible in its characterization capabilities, and thereby, provides the capability to describe a wide spectrum of different requirements generation processes.

The sustainability of agile transformations is deeply linked to how the organization “transforms” to agile. Sustainable, effective agile transformations affect all the elements of culture such as, leadership style, leadership values, work structures, reward systems, processes, and of course the work habits of people. How to affect that culture shift is the key question we will present in this chapter. The author will present two different common transformation approaches (organizational-led and process-led) and then describe a hybrid version called culture-led transformation that is designed to change critical organizational and personal habits to improve and sustain organizational agility.