The 9th Annual State of Agile Survey is currently open for participants to share their adoption of Agile practices and processes for inclusion in the annual report. Supported by VersionOne, the survey has been conducted since 2006 and provides an important Agile snapshop to the IT community.
Now in its 9th year, the State of Agile has helps agile practitioners, consultants, technology students, professors, bloggers and business people in all industries better understand agile methods and practices. The survey runs late summer through mid-September and VersionOne publishes the report in Q4 or early Q1.
The 2013 State of Agile Survey included 3,051 responses and included insights such as the percentage of projects inside organisations using Agile, the usage of Agile frameworks and practices, the leading causes of failed projects and the items that ease Agile adoption at scale, amongst others. InfoQ talked to Robert Holler, the President and CEO of VersionOne earlier this year about the 2013 results:
A common theme that permeates the entire report is the fact that this is a cultural change, it’s a human change, it’s not an overnight binary change and the barriers to adoption are primarily human issues as opposed to technology or practice issues. Looking at what’s evolving based on the survey results over the years, there are three key elements - knowledge, experience and the practices.
Knowledge: awareness of agile concepts and agile development is now pretty pervasive. Two years ago 81% of respondents knew about agile, which meant that 19% did not – now 88% have heard of agile; that’s a significant change over the last two years.
Experience: companies with two or more years of experience have grown from about 50% to over 72%, so nearly three-quarters of organizations have more than two years of experience using agile, which points directly to maturity.
Practices: One of the most interesting changes is the number of organizations with distributed teams practicing agile a year ago was 35% this year it’s 76% - a huge change.
Responses are anonymous and participants go into the draw for prizes as well as receiving early access to the data sample. The survey is open until September 18, 2014.