at this years w-jax conference i attended a keynote by scott ambler, who’s one of the guys pushing the agile movement for several years now. in his talk he presented results of surveys about adoption rates of agile techniques and success rates of agile it-projects. there are some interesting numbers in it, despite the fact that they are mostly covering the situation in the states. it would be even more interesting to collect data for these topics in europe, too, and draw some comparisons. for me the most important findings are:
- 69% of organisations have adopted agile techniques so far
- the most effective agile practices are “iterative development” and “regular delivery of working software”
- one-third of projects are done with two week iterations
- 44% of organisations had a success rate of 90% or above for agile projects
- project success rate for agile projects is 10% higher than for “traditional” projects
- only 42% of offshoring projects are successful, but they are considerably more succesful in asia than in the rest of the world
- the number of successful projects is dropping significantly for teams larger than 10 members
- 80% of it-managers and 70% of project managers put the needs of their staff over beeing on time and on budget
- 70-80% of it-personnel see a healthy workplace beeing more important than beeing on time and on budget, but only 53% of business stakeholders share this opinion 🙁