Hello,

Every year VersionOne performs a worldwide survey about the state of agile development. Today we are going to talk about this.

For comparison purposes, I've done a post like this depicting data from previous research. You can access this post through this link and check out the subtle changes occurred during one year period. But do not worry, I will highlight it here.

To elaborate this study 3,501 IT professionals were interviewed. Of these, about 88% have knowledge of agile practices, reflecting an increase of 7% in previous survey. Most of respondents states they use agile techniques for approximately 2 to 5 years. The one using agile for over 5 years corresponded to 19% of respondents. Comparing to survey two years before, it is an increase of 9%.

Respondents were most commonly project managers, scrum masters and team leads, followed by software development team members. The following chart shows these profiles.

State of Agile Development - fig01

Let’s take a look into other interesting charts!

Below we can see the percentage of organization's projects that adopt agile methods. This measure allows us to see how companies already using agility are trying to apply agile techniques in all of their projects.

State of Agile Development - fig02

The range of 0% – 25% was 31% in previous survey. Currently, this number dropped to 27%. This is a small change, but in the desired direction. yes

State of Agile Development - fig03

Scrum are still the most popular agile methodology being used, followed by Scrum/XP Hybrid with similar percentages. The scenario remains unchanged.

State of Agile Development - fig04

The chart above represents the amount of respondents who said they use or not each of the agile techniques. Compared to the previous survey, most of the techniques had improved slightly. Few of them had a small decrease. The highlight is Kanban (from 32% to 39%) and Digital Taskboard (from 39% to 45%). This increase of people using Digital Tawskboard is probably related to the drop from 24% to 22% in use of Analog Taskboard.

The number of people using tools to support agility is growing up. For us, it is an encouragement to carry on with the good work and keep improving Scrumhalf.

State of Agile Development - fig05

Finally, each respondent answered the main reasons to adopt agile methodologies in your team or organization. The numbers are similar to previous survey. There are no important changes. The bottom 3 answers in the chart were considered more important. We can see most responses centered on better customer focus.

The complete research is available on the VersionOne website. You can access directly through this link.

Till next post!