Survey Says: Agile Works in Practice

IN A PRESENTATION at the Rational Software Developers Conference, Ivar Jacobson summed it up well with "These days, to say that you're not agile is the equivalent of saying that you're not potent." Be that as it may, it's clear that the agile software development movement has garnered more and more attention within the IT community over the past several years. But for many people, rhetoric isn't sufficient—they want to know how many people are actually doing this agile stuff, what are they doing, and are they actually benefiting from it? To answer these questions I ran a survey in March of 2006, which was sent out to the combined mailing lists from Dr. Dobb's Journal and Software Development. The survey was based on one performed in 2003 by Shine Technologies (http://www.shinetech.com). Although my results are similar, my survey reached a larger number of people (4232 versus 131 responses) and it's up to date.