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How are agile businesses changing in 2023? Digital.ai, the creator of the industry’s first intelligent Value Stream, recently published its 16th Annual State of Agile Report and a survey addendum to reflect the 2022 landscape. The report looked into the enterprise, what Agile techniques companies are implementing, their benefits, and what’s trending.
The report provides the most comprehensive data in the world to benchmark your Agile practice and plan your next wave of expansion. The survey documents the experiences of more than 3,220 business and IT professionals across a range of industries and roles worldwide.
About 40,000 Agile practitioners, consultants, and executives have shared their insights to make this the longest-running and largest report. It revealed insights beyond the general results by filtering them along demographic lines for the first time. The analysis indicates a correlation between the time practicing Agile, the ability to manage the changing priorities, and improved time to market. Go for CSM certification training and get experiential learning with case studies, scrum activities, role plays & simulations.
Let us explore the top responses to the survey in numbers. Respondents answered their top reasons for implementing Agile techniques, which techniques and methodologies they employ the most, what tools they recommend most, and the top benefits of using Agile.
Respondents were asked why their teams adopted Agile methodologies and techniques. These were the most responded benefits:
This year, the reasons for implementing Agile were more about reducing project risks than project costs.
These are the five most used tactics that help teams adhere to the twelve principles of Agile.
We see that the top five benefits of adopting Agile are built around speed and adaptability. Project Cost Reduction was last on the list, with only 26 percent of the respondents considering it to be the benefit of Agile implementation.
The survey shows that Scrum and its variants are the most common methodologies used for Agile implementation. 3 percent of the respondents didn’t know the methodology used by their organization.
Respondents were asked if they would recommend the tools based on their experience. Atlassian JIRA and VersionOne were the most recommended tools.
The survey showed that only 18 percent of the organizations implemented Agile for all the teams. 77 percent of the organizations had still not implemented Agile in all the company’s teams. With 5 percent of the organizations yet to adopt Agile, there is clearly plenty of area for growth.
As per the respondents, accelerated delivery speed is the most critical measure of the success of Agile initiatives. Next is improved quality, followed by reduced risk and increased customer satisfaction. Reduced IT costs are low on the spectrum, with just 39 percent considering it as important for measuring success.
The survey results for this section remain consistent over the past few years. There might be some ups and downs. But overall, Customer Satisfaction and Business Value are at a higher rank than productivity and on-time delivery.
These included: resistance to change, lack of leadership participation, inconsistent processes, misaligned organization versus agile values, inadequate management support, and insufficient training.
The lack of qualified professionals also remains one of the common challenges with insufficient leadership participation (46 percent) at number 2 and lack of experience or skills with Agile methods (41 percent) at number 6.
The report also shows that culture is the primary target of change as it affects the thinking and working of the organization.
DevOps practices are a strong partner to agile methodologies, and 69 percent of survey respondents stated that DevOps transformation was either important or very important to their organization. But adoption of DevOps practices lags behind its importance, with only 55 percent employing continuous integrations and 41 percent continuous delivery. Only 36 percent practice continuous deployment.
The top two benefits targeted are accelerated delivery speed (70 percent) and improved quality (62 percent). But respondents are tackling quality first, with 67 percent implementing unit testing and 58 percent coding standards, even higher engineering practices over the 55 percent on continuous integration.
More than half of the respondents reported that their organization was already implementing Value Stream Management (VSM) or had plans to do so. VSM is a combination of people, technology, and processes that maps, measures, optimizes, visualizes, and governs the business value flow using a heterogeneous enterprise delivery pipeline.
Each level of automation requires investment and additional work to prove its robustness. There are seven prerequisites before improving release frequencies, and that requires investment in aspects of these seven DevOps practices. Even so, there are questions DevOps teams should answer before increasing deployment frequency.
The Agile approach is predominantly implemented in the software or information technology sector. The benefits an organization can reap once Agile is implemented in other areas would also be tremendous. Below is a quick summary of key insights from the report. Go for KnowledgeHut CSPO certification and excel in the field.
Agile state report provides the most comprehensive data in the world to benchmark Agile practice and plan your next wave of expansion.
The three levels of scaled agile framework are team level, program level, and portfolio level.
The 5 stages of agile development lifecycle are:
a. Ideation
b. Development
c. Testing
d. Deployment
e. Operations
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