Annually Version One does an survey of the state of agile. Very useful.
I am not sure it is a scientific survey, but it tries and it generally does give some useful insights, even though they cannot be said to be scientific truths.
See here.
To me, it says we are making progress. That is, more people are using Agile, and lives are getting better. Or that’s what I infer from the survey and what I see.
Equally, we have a long way to go. While a few teams are getting outstanding success, there are many many teams that could be doing agile far far better. And their customers (and their firms) could be enjoying that success. And that greater success could be achieved by working fewer hours with less stress.
Why? Or, what do we do about it?
1. Change the culture. That is, our firms have a ‘waterfall’ culture that works counter to the success of agile.
2. Focus on the magic of the Team. Hmmm. If you do not know what I mean, it is hard to explain.
3. Fix impediments aggressively.
4. Enable more self-organization and let the teams know they are responsible.
5. Do Scrum and agile more professionally.
6. Scale less.
7. Scale more professionally. By this I mainly mean, add one pattern at a time, and get each pattern to work professionally before adding more ‘scaling stuff’.
6. Co-locate more. (By co-locate, I mean a team room. The data show this doubles team productivity.)
Note: We can reach hyper-productivity with scaled and distributed teams. It is just much harder, and I think productivity is lower than it could have been. (But we have minimal data to confirm or deny my hypothesis. AFAIK, no one checks these facts in anything like a fair way.)
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I would be interested in your ideas on how we move forward more successfully.
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