ISO/IEC TR 24587:2021 PDF

Overview

ISO/IEC TR 24587:2021 - "Software and systems engineering - Agile development - Agile adoption considerations" is a Technical Report that describes agile readiness factors to help organizations, projects, products and teams determine whether they are prepared to transition to an agile approach. The document is methodology‑agnostic (it does not prescribe Scrum, SAFe, XP or other specific frameworks) and provides a structured, practical overview of the organizational, customer, team, management, people and tooling considerations that influence agile adoption success.

Key topics and considerations

The report organizes agile readiness across multiple dimensions (informative, not normative requirements). Major topics include:

• Organizational readiness
  • Funding models, management support, organizational change and change‑support mechanisms, and prior agile experience.
• Customer readiness
  • Ability to provide incremental delivery and feedback, stakeholder interaction and decision‑making, agreements, quality control, documentation and progress reporting.
• Project and team factors
  • Project/product team composition, user involvement, project type, size/scope, iteration length and criticality.
• Management
  • Practices around overtime, motivation, quality ownership, documentation, handling mistakes, process improvement and management transition.
• People and team characteristics
  • Geographic distribution, office space, defined roles, self‑organizing teams, autonomy, skills, non‑development funding, training, coaching and perceptions of agile.
• Tools and practices
  • Communication tools, defect management, pair programming, automated unit testing, continuous integration and testing, automated system testing, specialist testing and project management tools.
• Supplementary content
  • Annex A: a quick reference guide of agile readiness criteria and a bibliography for further reading.

Note: the report references established terminology sources and related documents (for example, it aligns the definition of agile development with ISO/IEC/IEEE 26515:2018).

Practical applications

• Perform an agile readiness assessment before launching organization‑wide or project‑level agile transformations.
• Identify gaps (e.g., lack of management buy‑in, insufficient testing automation or weak customer feedback loops) and prioritize remediation actions such as training, tooling, piloting or governance changes.
• Design transition plans, coaching programs and pilot projects tailored to organization and team characteristics.
• Inform procurement, contract and stakeholder engagement practices when shifting delivery models to iterative, incremental approaches.

Who should use this standard

• Senior managers and decision‑makers evaluating agile adoption feasibility
• Transformation leads, agile coaches and trainers preparing organizations for change
• Project managers, product owners and team leads planning pilot projects
• Quality, testing and tooling leads assessing technical readiness

Related standards

• ISO/IEC/IEEE 26515:2018 (referenced for agile development terminology)
• Use ISO/IEC TR 24587 as a practical, checklist‑oriented companion when planning agile adoption.