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Agile Adoption Rate Survey
Results:
March 2007
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This survey was performed in early March 2007 and there was 781 respondents.
The survey was announced in the blog of Jon Erickson, the Dr. Dobb's Journal
editor.
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The results of the survey are summarized in
Survey
Says... Agile Has Crossed the Chasm published in the August 2007 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal.
Some findings include:
- 69% of respondents indicated that their organizations are doing one or
more agile projects. Of those that hadn't yet started, 24% believed
their organizations would do so within the next year.
- 44% indicated a 90%+ success rate at agile projects, 33% indicated
between 75 and 90%. It appears that agile seems to be working out.
- Co-located agile projects are more successful on average than
non-co-located, which in turn are more successful than projects involving
offshoring.
- 98.6% of agile teams worked adopted iterations, and 83% had iteration
lengths between 1 and 4 weeks.
- Smaller teams had higher success rates than larger teams.
- 85% of organizations doing agile had more than one project completed, so
it's gone beyond the pilot project stage in most organizations.
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.
- Pair programming didn't rate as well as I had expected, probably because
many organizations often don't give it sufficient time to take root on a
project team.
- Every practice that I asked about was rated above average, although I
didn't explore many traditional practices such as detailed up-front modeling
and detailed up-front planning because they were covered by questions about
the effectiveness of work products.
- The results for
database
refactoring and
database
testing did, although, to be fair, this is likely a reflection of the
current lack of tool support for these concepts.
- Developer tests and
whiteboard sketches pretty much received the same score. Yet,
developer testing seems to receive at least an order of magnitude more
discussion on agile forums than does whiteboard sketching. This is
frustrating consider how often agilists are criticized about not modeling.
We need to start talking more about what we actually do in practice.
- There's clearly a loud message that detailed documentation has little
value to add on agile teams. We do take
agile
approaches to documentation however.
- Both detailed and high-level Gantt charts were rated very poorly
although task lists were very close to the top, an indication that agilists
prefer simpler approaches to project planning
- The adoption rate figures, although higher than in 2006, might not be
comparable to the results of my
2006 Agile
Adoption Rate Survey because the questions were asked differently.
- Even though the success rates appear higher, it may be difficult to
compare the success rates claimed in this survey with traditional success
rates due to a lack of definition of success.
- 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. Therefore they may be more aware of new trends in IT
than people who don't read.
- The request that went out indicated that the survey was exploring agile
adoption, so the adoption figures could be a bit higher as a result due to
selection bias.
- The vast majority of respondents 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.
- This survey suffers from the
fundamental challenges faced by all surveys.
Links to Other Articles/Surveys
- 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.
