Definition:
Clients, Management other stakeholders need to know “How are they doing?”. A business does not need to be perfect, it needs to be better than its competitor, stay ahead of them. Organisations are not striving for perfection against some idealised list of agile principles and practices, they are trying to be more agile than their competitors. Becoming agile itself is not a goal, producing better products than the competition remains the goal. Being more agile than one’s competitors indicates organisations ability to deliver better products more quickly and cheaply.
Kenny Rubin and Mike created the Comparative Agility assessment, where assessment can be based on individual responses to survey questions. Survey responses for the organisation are aggregated and compared against entire database of assessments. This approach assesses on seven dimensions: teamwork, requirements, planning, technical practices, quality, culture and knowledge creation. A comparative nature of the assessment was intended to be its biggest strength, seeing how your organisation compares with other other organisation improvement efforts can be focused on the most promising areas.
Further Reading:
Book: SUCCEEDING WITH AGILE Software Development Using Scrum by Mike Cohn