The Diffusion of Agile Software Development: Insights from a Regional Survey

Abstract

The agile approach to software development is now standard practice in many organizations. In innovation diffusion terms, its uptake seems to be well into the majority adoption phase, with a large number of organizations now claiming some level of agile activity. Confirming adoption progress requires appropriate periodic surveys of industrial practice. The purpose of this chapter is to present and comment on the results from such a survey, performed in Northern Ireland in 2010, with 37 software development companies. The work is distinctive in aiming to provide comprehensive coverage of the region. This chapter describes the design of the survey and comments on the insights it has provided. The results show that approximately 50 % of companies are now running agile projects routinely, with over 80 % of those using Scrum as their agile framework. The wider extrapolation of the results is also discussed.