The delusion of agility is as common among practicing software engineering teams as is the common cold during the fall season. A software development life cycle (SDLC) as sophisticated as agile can thrive if a team can express a sufficient maturity level in many areas where vestigial habits, corporate power structure, and delivery pressure (among the rest) exercise powerful and distracting influences. Wouldn’t it be informative to assess semi-quantitatively how far along the path to agility an already-established SDLC has come?

Among the theoretical schemes in the literature, “Becoming agile” shines for introducing a novel experimental approach based on grounded theory (GT), a methodology borrowed from the social sciences. Following GT’s procedural requirements, this work surveys a small (but hopefully representative) sample of software engineering team members to identify representative factors (perhaps we can inappropriately label them “principal components” for a little intuition on their meaning) and relevant metric levels for each factor. Brevity demands that this work provide no introduction to the agile SDLC, knowledge and understanding of which is a prerequisite for the interested reader; some familiarity with GT is also taken for granted. The most serious concern is the small size of the sample, and its representative value. The conclusions are sensible, and represent a step in a valuable direction rather than an ultimate achievement. The basis of this work is not suitable for self-assessment, as delusions are powerful sources of bias; however, it remains a worthwhile approach nonetheless.