The Mature Agile Organization

Another post I had on Borland's Agile Transformations blog:

Here's a quick note about a recently published technical note from the SEI: CMMi or Agile: Why Not Embrace Both? There's talk about it from some of the authors: David Anderson, Hillel Glazer and Jeff Dalton. I saw them and Mike Konrad discuss the draft at an impromptu session at last year's SEPG Conference and am heartened to see the progress being made in the communities working together.

I'll have some more thoughts on the technical note itself, but a bigger question in your mind may be "CMMi and Agile? Those can't go together." I heard that comment from a colleague the other night at dinner. I disagreed and my answer was "A poorly implemented CMMi based process improvement- one that mistakes the model for a process description and that doesn't keep a firm eye on the goal of delivering business value- won't be very Agile. And, a poorly implemented Agile based improvement effort- one that doesn't recognize the amount of discipline required, for example, or doesn't address what's necessary to scale up to an enterprise level- won't look good from a CMMi view. But, I don't want either one of those things!"

Do you agree that there's value to an Agile organization in looking at the CMMi?

Originally posted by Michael Maham on December 16, 2008 at http://borland.typepad.com/agile_transformation/2008/12/the-mature-agile-organization.html