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'State of Agile' Survey Open

by Chris Sims on Aug 03, 2009 |

The fourth annual 'State of Agile' survey is open for public participation. The 6-page survey takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete and participants remain anonymous. Over the past 3 years the survey, sponsored by VersionOne, has gauged how widely agile practices have been adopted, as well as the results obtained.

The survey covers:

Personal experience
Your company's experience and level of involvement with agile
Which practices are in use
Motivations for adopting agile
Results achieved
Tools used

Last year's survey was based on 2,319 completed surveys, representing 80 countries. One surprising result was that more than half of respondents indicated that 90 - 100% of their organization's agile projects had been successful. Practices with 20% (or better) increases in adoption included: taskboard, iteration planning, daily standup, retrospectives.

In 2007, a little under 1,700 surveys where completed, representing 71 countries. The agile practices most widely adopted, according to that survey, were iteration planning and unit testing. Ninety percent of respondents reported increased productivity, while 85% reported a reduction in defects. The full results are available as a PDF from VersionOne.

The first survey, back in 2006, had 722 participants from 47 countries. The survey indicated that the most popular methodology was a hybrid of Scum and XP. The most commonly cited improvements that organizations realized from agile practices were: accelerated time-to-market, increased productivity, and reduced defects.