The 11th annual state of agile survey is open through October 7, 2016. The survey explores the worldwide adoption of agile:
Every year, thousands of people are interested in the results of our State of Agile survey. The report gives software professionals deep insight into agile trends, best practices and lessons learned to help them succeed with their agile transformations. The report has become the largest, longest running, most widely cited agile survey in the world!
VersionOne announced the 11th survey in August. CEO and Co-founder Robert Holler mentioned some of the topics that the survey covers:
We encourage agile practitioners to take the survey and share their opinions on a wide range of topics including the benefits of agile, advice for scaling agile, and lessons learned to ensure agile transformation success.
The 10th state of agile Report, published April 2016, showed several trends in the adoption of agile. One trend is that the biggest challenges to agile adoption remain to be cultural:
As in previous years, respondents continued to increasingly cite organizational culture and a general resistance to change as their biggest barriers to further agile adoption. Concerns about organizational culture increased from 44% in 2014 to 55% in 2015, and concerns about a general resistance to change increased from 34% in 2014 to 42% in 2015.
In the InfoQ article Growing Agile… Not Scaling Andrea Tomasini and Dhaval Panchal confirm that changing the culture can be tough, but it’s doable:
While changing culture is a challenge for every organization, there are approaches and tools which can help understanding where one stands, and also designing together in which direction to evolve to create the right context to support the current strategy. Only in this way, changes will stick, and will be owned by the people within the organization instead of by the institution governing it.
One advice they give is to make clear what you want to keep when changing the culture:
Also given that companies tend to identify themselves pretty strongly with one culture or another, it has been very important to identify also what to keep from the existing culture, that would provide value also for the future. This sends a very important message to the people, that isn’t "we are doing things wrong around here", but rather "we are doing things great around here, and there are options to improve even more".
Lee Cunningham, one of the authors of the report, mentioned several trends visible in the 10th State of Agile Report. One of them is the adoption of agile outside IT:
The spread of agile practices from just software development to other areas of the organisation is starting to happen. Agile marketing, agile HR are two areas that have recently been identified.
Earlier this year the agile consortium launched a marketing communication chapter to exchange knowledge on agile among marketing and communication professionals. A recent Agile Marketing Survey showed the adoption of agile in marketing:
The survey reveals that Agile methodologies are "partially" embraced by many marketing teams. A majority of marketers have partially embraced Agile, with only 21% fully embracing Agile, and 7% not embracing it at all.
Participants of the annual state of agile survey will receive an advance copy of the report when it’s available.
