Agile Benchmark is designed to assess your development practices, which is the first step in a software development or project audit. Agile Benchmark provides objective measurement by comparing your development practices with "best practices", i.e. practices that have consistently been proven successful in similar contexts.

Methodology

Agile Benchmark is methodology-agnostic; it combines the most relevant elements of the agile and lean philosophies and of specific methodologies such as Scrum, IBM Rational Unified Process (RUP), OpenUP, and the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). It also includes some elements of organizational behavior such as team dynamics and reward structure. Consequently, Agile Benchmark constitutes an excellent tool to provide a comprehensive and unbiased assessment of your software development practices.

360 degree assessment

Agile Benchmark conducts a 360 degree assessment by surveying all roles affecting the outcome of the development of a software solution, from project manager to developer to client representative. Agile Benchmark asks different questions depending on the roles of the participants. The resulting report compiles all different perspectives to produce an accurate snapshot of the reality.

History

Because initiating audits involves interviewing team members and stakeholders in a standard way, it makes perfect sense to build a tool that can perform this step by asking the right questions to the right people and compiling the results in an actionable report. Bruno Collet conducted consulting missions to audit software development processes. When he founded Synapsys Canada in 2009 to expand the reach of Synapsys (Belgium), he set up a small team in Montreal, QC, Canada, and Brussels, Belgium, to develop Agile Benchmark. Agile Benchmark is provided for free as part of Synapsys Canada's promotional offering.

Current status

Agile Benchmark is currently under development. Consequently, some important features are missing and there are some minor reliability issues. However, Agile Benchmark has been made public because we believe it already provides great value for people interested in assessing how their development practices compare with best practices.