In conversation with potential clients, I almost always ask them the following question: “Why do you want to move to Agile?” and in most circumstances their answer makes sense. I would get answers such as:

• We are hoping to improve productivity;
• We aim to decrease time to market;
• Turn over has been high and we wish to implement an approach that will increase employee morale;
• We need to reduce costs;
• Etc.

And then, I get what I would call “wrong answers”. Those answers address my question at face value but also show that the decision has not been evaluated for more than thirty seconds. Here are 7 “wrong reasons” to adopt Agile. Go ahead – share yours!

1. We recently attended a conference and Agile is becoming more popular. If others are doing it, so should we.

2. Because Gartner and Forrester say so.

3. Because employees asked us to do so.

4. Some of our people are available to experiment with a new approach.

5. Our competitor is gaining market share and they are using Agile. We need to use the same approach if we want to be able to compete.

6. We produce too much documentation.

7. Because our boss told us to do so.

Other interesting articles:

Destination: Agile Top Eight Reasons Why Organizations Are Making the Switch

3 Reasons Why I Would Not Do Agile Project Management

Introducing Agile Methods: Mistakes to Avoid

Why Agile doesn’t sell with Management ?

11 Ways Agile Adoptions Fail

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Gartner studied the market and attempt to predict trends in their latest report: Predicts 2010: Agile and Cloud Impact Application Development Directions.

As organizations seek to improve productivity and reduce application operating and maintenance costs, we will continue to see an evolution of software development tools, platforms and practices. To take advantage of this, organizations must shift structures and practices while embracing new technologies — a challenging proposition.

Gartner’s analysts (Thomas Murphy and David Norton) predict that by 2012 “agile development methods will be utilized in 80% of all software development projects”. The authors explain that although Scrum will continue gaining in popularity over the coming years, organizations will not be successful in their transition unless they move toward a team-focused culture. As was mentioned in their previous report, very few organizations use a pure-Scrum approach and most rely on an hybrid approach (waterfall and Agile).

The report highlights that organizations struggle to implement true collaboration in the context of globally distributed teams. A situation that has amplified in recent years with outsourcing and off-shoring of software development projects.

In the other hand, the report confirms that teams who have successfully moved to Agile do see productivity improvements especially in “the flexibility of the development team to respond to shifting requirements”. This is especially true for web-based application developments where rapid responses to a changing environment is critical.

The authors point out that organizations need to properly invest in such a transition in order to achieve success.

Organizations that do not make use of key agile practices and do not invest in training and supportive tools’ infrastructure will find that a shift to pseudoagile, while potentially delivering a short-term productivity bump, will end in long-term declines in quality and productivity (…) the promise of four times the improvements in overall productivity has been and will be achieved by select organizations.

Gartner’s report highlights that “development organizations have been making a shift toward agile methods, but this is still slow to move beyond development, and often is a mixture of waterfall practices utilizing an agile or iterative project cycle”. The authors also recommend to “look for opportunities to utilize agile development practices, but recognize that it requires changes and commitment on the part of business and IT”.

Gartner concludes with a few recommendations to help organizations maximize their return from an Agile transition.

• Recognize the cultural changes that are at the heart of agile.
• Don’t allow agile excitement to drive cowboy-coding practices.
• Agile requires discipline.
• Recognize that scrum is only a partial solution, and focus on a collection of practices.
• Find tools that enable collaboration and help automate repeatable, consistent practices.

Related documents:

• Don’t Let Short-Term Agile Create Long-Term Pain
• The Current State of Agile Method Adoption

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As part of a market research for one of our customer, I came across this report published by Gartner in December 2008.

As the pace of agile adoption increases, development organizations must understand the different levels of agile maturity. CIOs and product and development managers need to assess where they fit on the maturity scale, and which level offers the biggest return in their organizations.

The report presents the 6 levels (from 0 to 5) of Gartner’s Agile Maturity Model and corrects a few myths.

Agile adoption and penetration rates are being overestimated. Although the number of companies that are adopting agile practices is, indeed, reasonably high, most organizations use agile in a very small percentage of their overall work.

An agile maturity framework is necessary to help make the case for adoption, process improvement and benchmarking.

Current adoption rates for agile and iterative methods are between 15% and 25%, when taking into account penetration and maturity, with waterfall still the dominant approach. The pace of agile adoption is increasing.

The report concludes that :

As part of an agile readiness assessment, IT development organizations should access their current agile practice maturity at technical, project management and organizational levels. Practices should be assessed for, among other things, their effectiveness and adoption levels in the organization. Adoption should follow initial pilots, and should normally be Level 2, with the aim of developing a consistent set of agile practices at Level 3.

RECOMMENDED READING

• Maturity Model Overview: Application Organizations

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