Software engineering has had maturity models for forty years. CMMI told organizations whether their processes were repeatable. ISO/IEC 33000 told them whether quality was measurable. Pöppelbuß & Röglinger (2011) gave the field a methodology to evaluate the maturity models themselves.
None of them speak the language of the engineer who, last Tuesday, dispatched four agentic flows in parallel, gated three of them with tests, killed one because the spec was wrong, and shipped the surviving merge inside two hours.
That engineer is doing something old (engineering) and something new (engineering with AI as a collaborator). The new part isn't "uses AI tools" — that's like measuring a programmer in 1995 by whether they used an IDE. The new part is how the work is structured when an engineer can hold multiple evaluation axes active in parallel — architecture, product, code, validation — and integrate what survives.
The Two Pillars Protocol is an instrument and a maturity model for measuring exactly that: the new individual cognitive capacity, and the organizational conditions that let it consolidate.
The two pillars
Pillar 1 — Mixer Mode (individual). The cognitive disposition to keep multiple evaluation axes active in parallel without switching hats. Not multitasking — modulation. Three sub-dimensions: Multiplicity, Simultaneity, Integration. Server-side scored from 18 items with explicit weights and inverse penalties.
Pillar 2 — Meta-Software (organizational). Software (and the organization around it) that understands, modifies, validates and supports other software at the symbolic level. Four D-scores: D1 Cognitive, D2 Meta-Software, D3 Institutional, D4 Exposure.
The two pillars compose into a 2D quadrant: Leading edge / Orchestrator without theory / Theory without practice / Early in the curve.
What the instrument is
- 78 items across 6 blocks (67 scored + 11 metadata/consent). 12–18 minutes.
- Server-side scoring (we never trust client-computed scores).
- K-anonymity ≥ 3 per aggregate cell. No org or sub-team reported with fewer than 3 respondents.
- Token-based individual reports — no account, no email login required.
- Cycle mode for organizations — internal cohort, aggregate dashboard, individual reports.
- Pilot license open by design. Operationalization and scoring code public at v0.5.
Why we're publishing it now
The instrument is in pilot v0.4. We've validated content with a handful of friendly engineers; we have early data from a small private cohort. The instrument works end-to-end.
What we don't yet know:
- Reliability (Cronbach's α) — needs ~200 respondents per functional area
- Predictive validity — needs 12–24 months longitudinal
- Cultural transferability — designed in EN, untested in translation
- Latent construct validity — factor analysis pending
These are open empirical questions. We're publishing now to gather the data needed to answer them.
How to participate
Take the diagnostic yourself. ~15 minutes. Individual mode is free, no account needed. The output is a private report with the Mixer Index, D-score perceptions of your org, quadrant placement, and peer comparison context. The private URL is the credential — bookmark it to re-access.
Run a cycle in your organization. For tech leaders who want to assess their team systematically. Self-service from the same URL with the ?cycle=new flag.
Engage with the model. If you find a measurement issue, missed prior framework, or operationalization issue, we want to know. [email protected].## Where this is going
The Two Pillars Protocol is in pilot v0.4. The v0.5 sprint completes cycle-aware reporting and the public release of the operationalization and scoring code. The v1 paper writes up the methodology, the crosswalk vs prior models (CMMI, ISO/IEC 33000, P&R 2011), and the initial empirical findings as the data accumulates.
The platform is operational. The model is real. The limitations are real and named.
Full conceptual depth and crosswalk methodology: https://rlabs.cl/blog/two-pillars-maturity-model-proposal
Two Pillars Protocol · pilot v0.4 · contact [email protected]