No I haven't lost my mind!...

In my blog post today, I speculate that the agile community is ready
for agile quality assurance auditing for "conformance to agile
process". See here.
http://www.agilemanagement.net/Articles/Weblog/ThoughtsfromAgile2006.
html

and then this afternoon I was doing an edit pass on the MSF guidance
looking for areas that need updating and I happened to read the
definition of the Auditor role from MSF for CMMI Process Improvement
(remember our CMMI method _is_ an agile method that just happens to
conform to 17 of the 21 process areas in CMMI model level 3)

Here is the text...

About Auditor
-------------
An auditor is external to the project and offers an independent
objective view of a project and its processes. The tendency for some
organizations is to have this function serve as "process police."
Following the team of peers mindset, this function should be more of
a "process coach," with the initial assumption that everyone wants
to do the right thing. An auditor effectively advocates and
communicates for the product management constituency in the MSF Team
Model by auditing the product and its processes and facilitating
corrective action. The auditor is responsible for assessing the
quality in the product as measured by quality control and the
quality assurance measured as conformance against process
definition. An auditor reports variance from specification, variance
from plan, and variance from process definition. An auditor's
reports can be used to assess the likely quality of the product and
whether or not the organization exhibits control in its operations.
A person assigned to this role should be added to the Contributor
permissions group. This allows them to do all that they need to
perform their function; such as create and modify the documents,
work items, and work products.


So my question to the group is, "What would agile auditing look
like?" How can we improve on the role of auditor as it is currently
defined in MSF (or in other CMMI implementations). Can we reinvent
the process quality assurance function and make it part of a "high
trust" organization, or is the idea of auditing always doomed to be
part of a "low trust" and by definition NOT (so very) agile
organization?

David