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Presentation: Agile in Practice: What Is Actually Going On Out There?

Posted by Abel Avram on Sep 05, 2008

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Agile
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Agile Techniques ,
Adopting Agile
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agile2008 ,
Surveys

In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Scott Ambler talks about actual data resulting from surveys made during 2006-2008, showing how Agile is perceived and implemented within organizations. Some of the topics surveyed are: the adoption rate of Agile, the effectiveness of Agile approaches, the effectiveness of various techniques.

Watch:  Agile in Practice: What Is Actually Going On Out There?(37 min)

Scott has conducted a series of surveys for Dr. Dobb’s Journal over the last three years on various aspects of Agile development. The results show how Agile is understood and used by people, how many are using Agile, what techniques they are using, etc.

Some of the results presented by Scott are:

  • 69% of the organizations have adopted an Agile technique.
  • Project success rate was: 83% for co-located teams, 72% for near located teams, 60% for far located teams.
  • 60% of IT managers and developers consider that repeatable results are more important that repeatable processes.

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11 comments

Watch Thread Reply

Agile is the new waterfall by Dan Tines Posted Sep 6, 2008 3:01 PM
Re: Agile is the new waterfall by David Zhu Posted Sep 6, 2008 8:11 PM
Re: Agile is the new waterfall by Shih-gian Lee Posted Sep 6, 2008 10:39 PM
Dr. Dobb's link is dead by Michel Löhr Posted Sep 9, 2008 7:59 AM
Re: Dr. Dobb's link is dead by Deborah Hartmann Posted Sep 15, 2008 10:03 AM
Excellent! Very enlightening! by Olivier Gourment Posted Sep 10, 2008 8:45 PM
Re: Excellent! Very enlightening! by Carlos Ortega Posted Sep 16, 2008 1:46 AM
Re: Excellent! Very enlightening! by Olivier Gourment Posted Sep 16, 2008 2:34 PM
Re: Excellent! Very enlightening! by Perry Hertler Posted Sep 23, 2008 1:24 PM
Do you know a report based in a higher number of companies? by A A Posted Sep 13, 2008 3:34 PM
Re: Do you know a report based in a higher number of companies? by Deborah Hartmann Posted Sep 15, 2008 9:42 AM
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    Agile is the new waterfall

    Sep 6, 2008 3:01 PM by Dan Tines

    ...and somewhat cultish.

  2. Back to top

    Re: Agile is the new waterfall

    Sep 6, 2008 8:11 PM by David Zhu

    Why said like that?
    Our team management is changing to Agile, is there no difference with waterfall??

  3. Back to top

    Re: Agile is the new waterfall

    Sep 6, 2008 10:39 PM by Shih-gian Lee

    Why said like that?
    Our team management is changing to Agile, is there no difference with waterfall??


    There is a difference. But, many organizations use Agile in waterfall way. The sad part is they don't know about it.

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    Dr. Dobb's link is dead

    Sep 9, 2008 7:59 AM by Michel Löhr

    Can this link be fixed?

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    Excellent! Very enlightening!

    Sep 10, 2008 8:45 PM by Olivier Gourment

    Overall, the first half of the presentation is a must-hear for anybody who is wondering why they should care about Agile/Lean.
    Scott presents very interesting results of a Dr Dobbs 2008 survey:

  6. - more managers think they are doing Agile than their developers
  7. - success rate is higher with colocated teams than distributed teams

  8. - Agile teams write as many documents as their traditional counterparts


  9. THANKS!



    PS: I completely missed the point with Modeling and TDD. Can anybody shed some light on this?

  • Having a look to the "Agile Project Success Rates %" slide there are 539 agile projects, which combined with the previous ones gave me a maximum of 125 companies (not hundreds by the way). I might miscalculated it, but if I am true, do you know any other report based on a higher number of surveys, please?

    Cheers!

  • This recent news item points you to a recent, larger survey by VersionOne software. Their sample did include companies NOT using their software.

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    Re: Dr. Dobb's link is dead

    Sep 15, 2008 10:03 AM by Deborah Hartmann

    Sorry, not sure which link you mean. Please email me the url at deborah@infoq.com and I'll get it out there. Thanks!

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    Re: Excellent! Very enlightening!

    Sep 16, 2008 1:46 AM by Carlos Ortega

    I think Scott tried to relate or compare the concepts of Design using UML / Modeling techniques vs the generation of the Design by using Test Driven Development and Refactoring.

    The basic idea in this sense is that before agile practices, the design was made by taking the requirements as input, applied some techniques and generate the design (and architecture) using models/diagrams as the main output artifact.
    While if you use TDD, it comes that the design emerges as consequence of the continuous application and evolution of doing Unit Testing and Refactoring to the code you write.

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    Re: Excellent! Very enlightening!

    Sep 16, 2008 2:34 PM by Olivier Gourment

    Thank you Carlos. What is Scott's point regarding these practices in real life? Why oppose both techniques?



    Specifying tests should not prevent people from creating some models? I agree that tests are more important than models, but models are still very often required as an aid to development, team members coordination and maintenance...



    I guess I will have to listen to that part again... :-)

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    Re: Excellent! Very enlightening!

    Sep 23, 2008 1:24 PM by Perry Hertler

    Olivier,

    I believe the point Scott was making is that since the majority of professing agilists don't do TDD then TDD is not a good practice and the converse is true for modeling.

    The person in audience questioned the validity of the survey because the majority of respondents do detailed documentation. In my opinion, that is a good question and Scott didn't answer it to my satisfaction.

    Maybe Scott's point is that the agile practices that are not adopted by the masses should be cut?

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