Second Annual 'State of Agile Development' Survey

Posted by Geoffrey Wiseman on Jun 20, 2007

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Process & Practices

Topics

VersionOneSoftware ,

Lean ,

Story Testing ,

Agile in the Enterprise ,

Project Management ,

Companies ,

Surveys ,

Agile ,

Agile2007 ,

Testing ,

APLN

The second annual State of Agile Development Survey, sponsored by the Agile Project Leadership Network and VersionOne has been released.  The survey attempts to "gauge the value of Agile Development practices", such as the methodology adoption described in the results to the 2006 survey.

The survey is described as taking "5-7 minutes to complete approximately 20 questions", and the results are completely anonymous.  The questions cover:

• you, your team and your organization
• adoption of agile within your organization
• the goals and impact of using agile methods
• your team and organization's choice of methods and tools

As a reward for participation, there are three Amazon gift certificates ($750, $250, $250), which will be randomly drawn for three participants.
The results will be presented at Agile 2007, and we'll make sure to keep you informed at InfoQ.

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   How many organizations?

   by Deborah Hartmann

   One lack I noted in last year's survey was: number of respondents was captured (700+ I believe) but there was no count of number of teams or organizations this represented. This strikes me as muddying the results, since questions addressed mainly teams and organizations. I've not looked at the new one yet - does the new survey address this?
   
   Does it matter?

   Reply

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   Re: How many organizations?

   by Stefan Koopmanschap

   This is a tough statistic to gather, since the survey is completely anonymous. How would they be able to find out about the number of different organizations?
   
   You have a valid point though, it can be an important piece of information for interpreting the results.

   Reply

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   Re: How many organizations?

   by Paul Culling

   Stefan is right. We tried to keep this totally anonymous and therefore it is a tough one to judge. We do know that the respondents represented 47 different countries (or at least that is where their computers were when they took the survey :)). One thing we DID do last year (which we will again) is look at the IP addresses of respondents to make sure there isn't an inordinate amount for responses from one place. The fact that the survey is really vendor-agnostic deters people from 'stuffing ballots'.
   
   The survey gets improved through feedback like this so thank you. Since it really is meant to be a broad-based survey that benefits the community as a whole, we tend to get great feedback and really appreciate it all.

   Reply