Australian Scrum Community

There is a very good article on the state of agile method adoption – particularly XP and Scrum – in the current issue of the influential CIO magazine (U.S. edition). Here are a few highlights.

A nice stat. on Agile vs waterfall projects:

The Standish Group, which famously compiles its Chaos data on software project failures, reported in its 2006 research that just 16 percent of waterfall projects succeeded as opposed to 41 percent of agile projects.

A nice stat. on quality improvement after the introduction of Scrum:

Farm Credit’s waterfall projects used to average 100 or so defects per rollout; agile ones now average zero to two.

On reporting to senior management:

...executives can feel left out of the daily scrums and sprints of agile life, engendering insecurity at top levels. All this has hindered agile’s acceptance, says John Scumniotales, one of the creators of Scrum. “It’s easy to talk about the value of building software this way, but if I’m betting my enterprise on this project, senior management needs some controls and visibility into the process,” he says, citing the need for an agile-specific tool that functions like a Gantt chart, which visually illustrates project progress. “That’s where we need to get to,” he says.

Although you’ve probably never heard of him, John Scumniotales was the first dedicated ScrumMaster on the Smalltalk IDE product at Easel Corp. where Scrum was incubated under Jeff Sutherland. Incidentally, a colleague and good friend of mine recently joined the company that currently works on that same development environment. John’s blog is well worth tracking.

Finally, make sure you read the 10 Questions To See If Your Company’s Developers Are Agile courtesy of VersionOne. Classic stuff!