 |
Agile Planning Mini-Survey
Results:
January 2012
|
 |
| |
|
|
 |
This survey was performed the last two weeks of January 2012 and there were
149 respondents. The survey was announced on the Agile and Lean
Discussion group on LinkedIn, the Agile Project Management group on
Yahoogroups, and by me via
Twitter. The goal was to find out from agilists how they were
addressing planning activities on their projects.
|
|
Some findings include:
- Figure 1 overviews the importance that agilists
think about various agile planning practices. As you can see the
results are very positive.
- Figure 2 depicts which initial release planning
practices were being followed. The majority of the responses in the
"Other" category, you can read the comments by
downloading the CSV file below, focused on initial
requirements envisioning activities such as identifying initial user
stories to
populate the backlog. It's interesting to see how
modeling has been
subsumed as a planning strategy on agile teams. I'll have to rework
this question next time we run this survey.
- Figure 3 indicates the average amount of time
that agile teams spend doing iteration planning. Lean teams would
refer to this practice as just in time (JIT) planning.
- Figure 4 shows that roughly two thirds of agile
teams do some form of look-ahead planning to give them a head start on
planning in a coming iteration.
- Figure 5 overviews the frequency of agile teams
holding daily coordination (Scrum) meetings.
Figure 1. What is the value of common agile planning
practices?
Figure 2. Approach to initial planning on agile
projects.
Figure 3. Time spent doing iteration planning.
Figure 4. Adoption rate of look-ahead planning.
Figure 5. The frequency of coordination meetings.
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.
- This survey suffers from the
fundamental challenges faced by all surveys.
- As I indicated above, I wish I had given options around initial modeling
when I asked about initial planning.
- I likely should have worded the iteration planning question to be
inclusive of JIT planning that we see on Kanban teams.
- Because the survey was announced on agile lists, there is a clear bias
towards organizations doing agile. This was done on purpose. Therefore these figures should not
be used to calculate overall adoption of agile techniques.
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.
