Using a validation model to measure the agility of software development in a large software development organization

This paper provides a metric for evaluating the agility of software development projects and organizations. The metric is based on a validation model derived from the V&V model. In this metric, agility is defined as minimizing the time between the production of intermediate deliverables and the validation of those deliverables. The major distinguishing feature of this metric is that it is independent of any particular software development process model, such as agile software development methods or the waterfall model. Therefore, this metric can be used for software development organizations that have a wide variety of software development projects with varying kinds of development processes. This metric has been shown to be practical in large software development organizations through exhaustive use in more than 7,000 projects over the last 9 years.