Measuring Agility and Architectural Integrity

Most organizations that depend on software are pursuing more flexible architectures and more agile life-cycle processes to increase business flexibility. What does agility look like, and how do we measure it? A truly agile project or organization should experience changes that are more straightforward and more predictable. Consequently, improvements are best measured by gauging the change trends in software baselines. A well-accepted tenet of software engineering states, “The later you are in the life cycle, the more expensive things are to fix.” This iron law, an artifact of a waterfall culture, should not apply if you have transformed to agile software delivery with a well-architected system. This bold assertion is the root of the metric patterns presented in this paper.