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Agile Adoption Rate Survey:
March 2006
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This survey was performed in March 2006 and there was over 4200 respondents.
The survey was sent out to the Dr. Dobb's Journal
and Software Development mailing lists.
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I've summarized the results in
Survey
Says: Agile Works In Practice
which appeared in the
September 2006 of Dr. Dobb's Journal.
You may use this data
as you see fit, but may not sell it in whole or in part.
You may publish summaries of the findings, but if you do
so you must reference the survey accordingly (include
the name and the URL to this page). Feel free to
contact me
with questions. Better yet, if you publish,
please let me know so I can link to your work.
- The results may be a bit optimistic because I used a mailing list
composed of IT professionals who very likely read on a regular basis (either
SD and/or DDJ). Therefore they may be more aware of new trends in IT
than people who don't read.
- Most organizations had positive results adopting agile
techniques/methods. It is incredibly clear that piloting agile
approaches within an organization is a very low-risk endeavor.
- The question regarding increased cost was poorly worded. In all of
the other questions 1 was the "very bad things happened" answer whereas 5
was the "very good things happened" answer, whereas with this question it
was the reverse. Hence the answers for this question may be more
pessimistic.
- I did not ask whether the person worked for a public (government) or
private organization, and therefore am unable to determine if a difference
in adoption rate exists.
- Similarly, I didn't ask about where in the world the respondent worked.
The vast majority of SD/DDJ readers are in North America, so these results
likely represent the experiences of IT professionals in North America but
perhaps not other parts of the world.
- I did not ask how many teams within an organization had adopted an agile
method or technique, just whether or not someone in the organization had
adopted one.
- I didn't include the RUP in the list of possible methods, so the method
adoption rate might actually be pessimistic.
- FDD got a significantly higher adoption response, but at least an order
of magnitude, than I expected. Perhaps people equated using a feature
list for requirements to being fully FDD. So, I suspect that the
results published in DDJ may be a little high.
- After a discussion with a few other "agilistas", and we all have
observed that many teams are doing a subset of the XP practices -- often
refactoring, test
first design, co-location, continuous integration, and a few others as
makes sense for their situation -- and claiming to do XP. However, an
aspect of XP is that you tailor it to meet your needs, so who is really to
judge?
- This survey suffers from the fundamental bias that all surveys suffer
from: it doesn't capture the opinions of people who aren't willing to fill
out a survey.
Links to Other Articles/Surveys
- Deb
Hartmann's The State of Agile in Practice (2006)
- Version One's
State of Agile Development Survey (2006)
- Digital
Focus Survey (2006)
- Trail Ridge
Consulting Agile Project Management Tool Survey (2006)
- Agile
Adoption Rate Survey (March 2007)
- Agile
Adoption Rate Survey (February 2008)
- My other surveys
Why Share This Much Information?
I'm sharing the results, and in particular the source data, of my surveys for
several reasons:
- Other people can do a much better job of analysis than I can. If
they publish online, I am more than happy to include links to their
articles/papers.
- Once I've published my column summarizing the data in DDJ, I really
don't have any reason not to share the information.
- Too many traditionalists out there like to use the "where's
the proof" question as an excuse not to adopt agile techniques. By
providing some evidence that a wide range of organizations seem to be
adopting these techniques maybe we can get them to rethink things a bit.
- I think that it's a good thing to do and I invite others to do the same.
