Update on the World of Agile

CollabNet has just published its 12 Annual Report on "The State of Agile". This makes interesting reading, although some filtering may be necessary as responses are dominated by North American participants in its survey. So for example SAFe tends to the prevalent approach taken to scaling Agile, which is more popular in the US than Europe.

To me, the most interesting bits are the high percentages of survey respondents reporting significant Business Value Oriented Benefits. Over 60% of respondents claimed:

• Better responsiveness to Changing Priorities;
• Improved Project Visibility;
• Enhanced Business/IT Alignment;
• Increased Speed to Delivery;
• Higher Productivity;
• Raised Team Morale.

The percentages far exceed the reasons for pursuing Agile. The other interesting metric is that only a fifth of respondents reported lower costs, which is in line with Agile philosophy, but still good to see confirmed.

The other key takeaway is that an increasingly high number of businesses have adopted both agile and DevOps as their mainstream approach.

The Inexorable DevOps Steamroller - 2017 State of DevOps Report

Puppet and DORA have published the 2017 State of DevOps Report. This analyses their most recent annual survey of DevOps practice and contrasts it with previous findings. 

(See: https://puppet.com/resources/whitepaper/state-of-devops-report)

It's pretty safe to say now that, with over 25% of respondents claiming to practice DevOps within their organisations, DevOps has become mainstream and is firmly embedding itself in standard practice.

The most striking thing about the current survey is that it examines the link between Transformational Leadership and successful adoption and goes on to assert that there is a correlation between successful adoption and IT Performance, as measured by speed of software deployment and stability of operations. The trends suggest that whilst laggards are starting to catch up in terms of deployment speed, this has been at the cost of worsening stability, expressed in terms of rate of deployment failures and times to recover.

More exciting though is the claims of correlation between IT Performance and Business Performance, using a range of measures of success such as Customer Satisfaction, Achieving Business Goals and Operational Efficiency.

The report also goes on to analyses various of the practices associated with DevOps, such as Continuous Delivery and Automation to conclude that it does have a statistically demonstrable impact on the success of Lean Development (otherwise known as Agile).

Overall, you can only conclude that if an enterprise is not practising DevOps yet, it should. Its very survival in the world of Digital As Normal will depend upon it. The business case for automation and software as infrastructure has never been stronger and the performance gap between those who adopt and those who don't is huge.