Assessing the Adoption Level of Agile Development Within Software Product Lines: The AgiPL-AM Model

Abstract

Agile Product Lines are combinations of agile and product-line techniques. Introducing agile software development methods into software product lines makes the development processes evolve from predictive to iterative and incremental and offers flexibility to react on customers' changing requirements and market demand and deliver high quality software. However, this combination is still challenging and the maturity of an agile adoption is often hard to determine. Assessing the current situation regarding the combination is thus an essential step towards a successful integration of agile methods into software product lines. Following a specific research approach, we have built an assessment model called AgiPL-AM allowing self-evaluations within the team in order to determine the current state of agile software development in combination with software product lines. AgiPL-AM, our model for assessing organizational agility of Agile Product Line approaches, is comprised of six categories (five are related to agile principles and one to product line architecture) and five levels of maturity. The assessment results demonstrate that AgiPL-AM has the ability to reveal and pinpoint agile product-line approach strengths and weaknesses. It makes recommendations to improve the status and may give a guideline for this improvement.