Is Agile at a standstill?

'Agile has peaked,' says Ambler

By Paul Krill, JavaWorld.com, 03/04/08

SAN FRANCISCO (03/03/2008) - Agile software development processes appear more effective than traditional approaches, but agile development seems to have hit a wall as far as growth, according to an IBM official's keynote presentation Monday afternoon at the SD West conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Citing survey data, Scott Ambler, IBM practice leader for agile development, said a February survey with about 600 respondents found 69 percent were utilizing agile development practices. "The bad news is, this is the exact same number we had last year," Ambler said. This, he said, leads him to speculate that "agile has peaked."

"Maybe there's still some more room for agile adoption, but we don't quite know yet," said Ambler. "The good news is that agile appears to be more effective in practice than traditional approaches. The evidence seems to be growing, at least."

Agile development is marked by its featuring short iterations, usually two weeks, in which parts of a software project are developed. This is counter to the long, drawn-out processes of traditional waterfall methodologies.

Some organizations, however, cannot adopt agile methods, Ambler said. "It's simply because of their own organizational culture." He said. "They have systemic challenges," said Ambler.

An attendee queried about agile development after the presentation backed up this notion.

"It's a good way to do small projects, at least from my perspective," said Rich Peters, senior software engineering manager at Braxton Technologies. "In our environment, we can't use that technology because we have government requirements about how we do our development. But for internal projects, it would be fine."

Ambler also said research found a disparity in what developers and managers thought was happening with agile; 61 percent of developers thought they were doing agile development while 78 percent of management thought agile development was in use.

Ambler cited issues with agile. "One of the biggest problems right now in the agile community is we've gotten really good at developing siloed systems. That's not useful," he said.

Some challenges to agile development include entrenched processes, enterprise discipline, compliance requirements, team size, and application complexity.