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Forrester Research:

One In Seven Enterprises Uses Agile, And Others Will Soon Follow


Do you have the full citation for this quote? and how recent is it?

David, I don't have the full citation. I picked that up from the figure captions listed on the executive summary page publicly available from the above URL. The summary is dated November 30th, 2005.

The introduction to the report seems consistent with what we're hearing from agilists in the blogsphere and from colleagues generally. It would be interesting to read the entire report. In the meantime, I would not assume too much. I work at a company that "uses Agile methods." We have 33,000 employees of whom about 1,300 work in the IT area. The Agile group comprises about 70 people, of whom about 15 have actually worked on Agile projects. If Forrester did a survey here and asked the simple question, Do you use Agile methods? the answer would be Yes. But what does it really mean? We certainly don't use Agile methods exclusively or primarily. The Agile movement is only one trend in the IT industry today. Companies are also experimenting with lean development methods such as the Toyota Production System or CMMI. Others are moving in the opposite direction and addressing IT problems by imposing even stricter process controls than before. It remains to be seen how these trends will eventually play out in the corporate world. I think what the competing trends mean to us as agilists is that we must broaden our message beyond the technical sphere and help corporate management understand the value proposition of Agile methods for large enterprises. Both consultants like Lasse and corporate animals like me face the same challenge at this point. This is a significant challenge because the mindset of senior corporate management is firmly fixed in traditional thinking. Agile principles go against everything they believe about sound project management.
Others following that is to be seen. It may take a long time though.

Yes, it might take a long time. And it's unlikely that we'll live long enough to see every single software project in the world using some kind of an agile method. Yet, I can't imagine trivial enough a software project in the corporate world that wouldn't benefit at least to some degree from being implemented iteratively and incrementally.



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