One particular agile assessment has become fairly popular recently: The Nokia Test. It's a set of eight simple questions, meant to be answered separately by all the members of a team. The questions are posed as assertions, and you respond by marking a score of 1 to 10 for each one. The responses are averaged and the result is used as a sort of litmus test of the team's agility, with an emphasis on Scrum. It's designed to be easy to understand and quick to complete. The first three questions pertain to iterative development generally, and the last five pertain to Scrum.
I think a questionnaire like this can help people understand their current state, establish a baseline definition of agile or Scrum that everyone can agree on, and set goals for process improvement. When people speak or write about the test, that's usually what they have in mind. I'm concerned that some people may be depending on this test, or others like it, to provide them with a definitive, standard, "official" definition of agile or of Scrum, or that they think the level of practice represented by the "right" answers is the end goal for organizations that are trying to adopt these methods. Each assessment is designed to cope with the circumstances that prevail at a particular organization at a particular time. It would be very easy for novices to get misleading results if they applied a test like this naively. Since the Nokia test enjoys a high level of popularity just now, I'd like to use it as the example for this post. The same cautions apply to any other agile assessment tool.