Is this good news? While their findings show that agile awareness and adoption are on the rise, their findings also come with a warning…
“The recent improvement in agile software development process visibility and acceptance should however make us cautious with the current results on agile adoption surveys. When software development practices are more widely accepted, the number of adopting organizations increases, but the substance of valid usage of this practices decreases. The answers to surveys tend then to be biased towards what should be the correct answer instead of reflecting the reality of the software development context. The tendency of upper management to “push” new approaches to people who are more reluctant to change their old habits does usually not produce good results. This is even truer when projects will not be given additional resources to support the transition.”
So what does this mean? This means that the rise in agile awareness and adoption will coincide with a rise in a veil of “agility” covering almost anything – including traditional software development methods. I agree with their observations and see this in practice quite often with companies that I meet. With the increase agile awareness has come an increase of agile perception. Many companies claim to be agile, or to be using agile methods, but often fail even the most basic tests of agility like the Nokia Test developed by Jeff Sutherland. Why does this happen? There are a number of reasons companies fail to walk the talk of agile. For one, it’s hard. It requires discipline and forces roles who typically don’t work closely together to collaborate frequently. It compresses an entire software life-cycle process into a very short and sometimes intense time period. Secondly, it’s adaptable. Teams often struggle with basic concepts and then using the inspect and adapt framework will throw away the core practices veering away from agile principles. Third, aligning organizational structures is difficult across many inter-dependent teams, locations, and disciplines. In some upcoming blog posts, we will dive further into the assessment framework of agile to help teams understand how to properly assess their agility and adapt without straying away from the agile principles.