On Monday at SD West, Scott Ambler presented recently updated survey results from a 600 person survey on Agile Development. His results are just the latest in a series of surveys around the move toward Agile Development. Scott’s results came with an assertion that the Agile development trend has “Hit the Wall.” Though Scott could ask that question based on his results, I suggest that he stop and ask the question, Why does his survey show no additional adoption since 2005, but other surveys shows a completely different story? I can not answer that question, but it would be great for Scott to go to the next level.

As a result of Scott’s quote, I decided to dig into what we can learn about Agile adoption in the marketplace and what it means to a software development organization today.

First, I dug into other surveys’ that are represented well at Methods and Tools and the latest information from Forrester. Carey Schwaber has updated their survey of 1,017 North America and European enterprises. The survey was done in Q3 2007, reported in February at “Agile Enterprise Adoption in 2007“.

She found that:


  • 26% are Already Using Agile and an additional 42% are aware
  • Adoption of Agile increased 56% from 17% in 2006, to 26% in 2007
  • Awareness increased 45% from 29% in 2006, to 42% in 2007

Her conclusions were as follows:

  • Agile adoption has accelerated
  • Large Enterprises are more likely to adopt Agile
  • Financial Service sector is the leading the pack to take Enterprise adoption
  • Agile adoption is correlated with adoption of open source, SOA, ALM and SaaS

The Methods and Tool survey found that from 512 respondents in February 2008 versus 232 in 2005 that:

  • Overall usage had increase by 77 % in adoption from 2005 to 2008
  • Between fully deployed, partially deployed and partially implement the 2008 versus 2005 results looked like this: (48% in 2008 compared to 37% in 2005)
    • Fully Deployed 2008 – 17% and in 2005 – 8%
    • Partially Deployed 2008 – 14% and in 2005 – 12%
    • Partial implementation 2008 – 17% and in 2005 – 17%

As an organization adopting or scaling Agile, I know that I would like to know three things:

  1. Is this a fad?
  2. Am I behind the curve in adoption?
  3. What real benefits are coming as a result of these efforts?

First, the accelerating year over year adoption and awareness rates point to the fact that Agile is not a fad that is flaming out.

Second, if you were to plot this against a normal distribution curve that follows an empirical rule where 68% of the curve is one standard deviation from the norm, you would get a picture like this:

Where the area under the curve represents the entire population of adopters, you might come to the following conclusions:

  • Agile adoption is across the Chasm (into the early mainstream area) by everyone’s accounts with between 17% (Ambler), 26% (Forrester) and 31% (Methods and Tools) of the market using/having deployed Agile.

So are you behind the curve? That really depends on what market and technologies you are using:

Yes, if you are building web 2.0, SOA, SaaS or with Open Source tools

Yes, if you are in the Financial Services Industry

Yes, if you think of your development team in the early mainstream or pragmatic adopter.

No, if you are using mainframe, embedded or client server technologies

No, if you are in the retail and public sector industries

What is the ROI and benefits of Agile Adoption?

  • Studies like the QSM studies on BMC’s Agile Adoption are showing great results with 4X improvement is delivery speed, 11% lower defect counts for and 20 to 50% productivity improvements.

Though Scott’s survey showed flat growth in adoption, I believe he needs to look at his survey population to understand the discrepancies from the other surveys. All the other surveys point to periods of continued growth as Agile becomes more mainstream across many industries and technologies.

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