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More Agile Teams Collocated, Survey Says


By David Rubinstein
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August 30, 2007 —  WASHINGTON, D.C. — Agile development practices are seeing wider adoption in larger organizations, according to results from VersionOne Software's 2nd "State of Agile Development" survey released at the Agile 2007 Conference here earlier this month.

Thirty-one percent of the respondents indicated their software organization is larger than 250 people, while 57 percent said their agile teams are distributed. "This points to the maturation of agile, that it's not just at the developer/peer level," said Paul Culling, VersionOne's director of marketing.

There were 1,681 completed surveys returned in June and July from developers and managers from 71 countries, which is more than double the response to last year's inaugural survey, Culling said.

Increased productivity is the benefit from agile development most cited by respondents; 90 percent said they have realized this after implementing agile practices. Eighty-five percent said a reduction in defects was the biggest benefit, while 83 percent cited accelerated time-to-market. Those rankings were mostly unchanged from last year's survey.

Development managers and team leaders were identified by 22 percent of the respondents as being the initial champion of agile within their organizations, while vice presidents/directors of development were second with 19 percent, and C-level executives were third with 18 percent. Only 8 percent identified software architects as the champions of agile, and 6 percent said that developers were responsible for bringing agile practices into their organizations.

When discussing their organizations' greatest concerns about adopting agile, 36 percent of respondents said a lack of upfront planning was their greatest concern; 30 percent said lack of documentation was paramount; and 26 percent said loss of management control was tops. The response to the concerns about a lack of upfront planning was somewhat surprising to Culling. "People think if you go to agile, you have to throw some things out. In reality, there's more planning [with agile practices], even though it might not be upfront," Culling said. "I think it was [lean development guru] Mary Poppendieck who said, 'Delay decisions to the last possible moment.'"

Full details of the survey are available at www.versionone.com/agilesurvey.





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