Assessing the Performance of Agile Teams.

Selecting a well performing agile software development team to develop a particular software is a complex issue for public authorities. This selection is often based on the estimated total cost of the project in an official request for proposals. In this paper we describe an alternative approach where three performance factors and the estimated cost were assessed and weighted to find the best agile team for a particular project. Five agile software development teams that fulfilled predefined technical requirements were invited to take part in one day workshops. The public authority involved wanted to assess both how each team performed during the workshops and the quality of the deliverables they handed in. The three performance factors were: (1) team collaboration and user experience focus, (2) user stories delivery and (3) the quality of the code. We describe the process of assessing the three performance factors during and after the workshops and the results of the assessments. The team that focused on one user story during the workshop and emphasized the three different quality factors, user experience, accessibility and security, got the highest rating from the assessment and were selected for the project. We also describe the lessons learned after concluding the assessment.