The process of Agile adoption follows its own lifecycle. After the Agile manifesto was published in 2001, Agile software development gathered a fair bit of attention, and was widely discussed by experts in the media. The iterative and incremental framework that promised to cut development time and costs, and yield better results for all stakeholders started to really gain traction in recent years, with adoption seemingly picking up worldwide.
But do media buzzwords like scaled Agile, DevOps, and enterprise Agility really trickle down into widespread practical use? What is the current state of Agile adoption, and what should we expect in the years ahead?
Pro tip: For Agile insights & best practices, sign up for our Agile Training Course!
Intland Software dedicated this summer to the topic of Agile practices and trends. Our highly successful Agile Training Course webinar series covered Agile issues and topics ranging from requirements management through safety-critical device development all the way to DevOps. With more than 300 participants on board, we collected feedback across industries about real Agile implementation plans and pains.
This blog post provides insights into the lessons learnt during this series, and gives a summary of our Agile Adoption Trends survey.
Growing interest in Agile
While Agile has been around for a while, it seemed to grow into maturity and a state of widespread implementation around 2014-2015. Awareness increased about the benefits of Agile across industries, and more and more teams started implementing Agile practices. As case studies, industry analyses, and a growing number of articles seemed to corroborate stories of successful transition, large enterprises picked up on the trend, driving interest in the topic of scaling Agile, making enterprise Agility a central topic of professional discussion around 2016.
With Agile practically revolutionizing requirements management and software development, teams were facing the challenge of making sure their testing & operations processes followed suit. Test-driven development, requirements-based testing, and Continuous Delivery moved into the center of attention, and with them, DevOps grew into a legitimate enterprise practice. In 2017, DevOps, a practice that extends Agile principles into the realm of software operations & maintenance, seems to be one of the hottest topics in the software world.
The main question now seems to be how software development lifecycle management tools will be able to integrate DevOps functionality. This convergence could result in next-generation ALM platforms either merging Continuous Integration & Delivery features into their existing functionality, or tightly integrating with DevOps tools. This will help enterprises enhance organizational Agility by providing a single platform to manage the entire development lifecycle from planning to deployment. Gartner expects DevOps toolchains to be built on enterprise Agile tools by as soon as 2020, suggesting the fast evolution of ADLM platforms in coming years to enable lifecycle-wide process visibility and management.
Intland Software's research reflects global trends
To gain insights into the general state of Agile in 2017, we asked those interested in our Agile summer classes to fill in a short questionnaire about Agile implementation. Their responses confirm Agile trends as reported by industry analysts, and underpin ever-growing transition rates.
Almost half of our respondents use Agile to manage requirements or certain software development processes, with about a third of respondents practicing Agile throughout the lifecycle. The main concerns holding back the transition process are compliance, scaling, and process control. Interestingly, documentation is not widely viewed as a problematic area, suggesting that Agile toolchains and processes have been able to grow and mature along with development needs.
Even more surprisingly, about 35% of respondents don't have plans to implement Agile at all. The rest, about two-thirds of all respondents, are looking to transition over to Agile at some point in the near future, with 18% having long-term plans (over 12 months) for adopting iterative and incremental development. Yet the high number of registrants (in total over 300 users signed up for our Agile summer classes) shows that there is increased interest in Agile practices even if a commitment to roll out Agile is yet to be made.
For an analysis of global Agile trends, and to find out more about what our survey data reveals, watch our webinar recording from Oct 2017 below:
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