31Jan 
I’ve been spending the past few days working in Cupertino in the heart of Silicon Valley. As I look out my hotel room window, I can see below me the headquarters of Apple and Symantec. This evening, I took a short drive to see the headquarters of Adobe, Google, HP, Intel, Yahoo and a few others (OK, I was bored and a little geeked out by being here). Spending time at the epicenter of the tech community had me asking the question, “If agile has really gone mainstream, how many of these tech companies are using agile practices, and if they are using agile, how are they doing?” When I got back to my hotel room, I Googled “agile adoption rates” and came across a survey that Scott Ambler did in March 2007 about the rate of agile adoption. Scott received 781 responses to his interview and published his findings on his website and in Dr. Dobb’s. According to Scott, his key findings were:
- 69% of respondents indicated that their organizations are doing one or more agile projects. Of those that hadn’t yet started, 24% believed their organizations would do so within the next year.
- 44% indicated a 90%+ success rate at agile projects, 33% indicated between 75% and 90%. It appears that agile seems to be working out.
- Co-located agile projects are more successful on average than non-co-located, which in turn are more successful than projects involving offshoring.
- 98.6% of agile teams worked adopted iterations, and 83% had iteration lengths between 1 and 4 weeks.
- Smaller teams had higher success rates than larger teams.
- 85% of organizations doing agile had more than one project completed, so it’s gone beyond the pilot project stage in most organizations.
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30Jan 
While I was flying out to San Jose this afternoon, I was re-reading Garr Reynolds’ new book Presentation Zen. If you haven’t read this book yet, run and out and get it now. It is the antidote to death by PowerPoint. One thought that struck me for a second time in Garr’s book is the idea of the “beginner’s mind” or the child’s mind. The beginner’s mind is a concept that comes to us from Zen teachings that, according to Garr, says “like a child, one who approaches life with a beginner’s mind is fresh, enthusiastic, and open to the vast possibilities of ideas and solutions before them”. Garr goes on to expound that “when you approach a new challenge as a true beginner (even if you’re a seasoned adult), you need not be saddled with fear of failure or of making mistakes.”
We can do very well on our agile teams if we approach our development tasks with the beginner’s mind. Developers are, believe it or not, creative people. If we all decided to think with a beginner’s mind about the solutions we develop, we might be able to create extraordinary software. OK, maybe not always extraordinary, but we might provide innovative solutions that were unexpected.
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28Jan 
I was watching an old movie last night that I think is hysterical called “What About Bob?” starring Richard Dreyfus and Bill Murray. Bill Murray plays a guy with tons of phobias. Richard Dreyfus plays his doctor who is teaching him about taking baby steps to overcome his fears. Bill Murray has one particular phobia about riding in elevators. At one point in the movie, he decides to finally try getting on an elevator and says “Baby steps onto the elevator…baby steps into the elevator…I’m in the elevator” (the doors close) “HELLLLLLLLLLP!!!!!”.
Seeing that movie was the perfect impetus for me to write this post. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately on how to take our company through the agile adoption process. I’m thinking baby steps (minus the “Help!” scream hopefully). Over the past few weeks I’ve spoken with a number of leading agile proponents about what they would do to adopt agile in an enterprise and the answer has been a resounding “baby steps”. I’m glad to hear that because that’s how our small development team first adopted agile ourselves. I don’t believe that an organization can just throw the magic agile switch and change things overnight. I think that agile has to be grown organically in a series of steps that help organizations successfully adopt and accept agile practices.
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23Jan 
I recently came across a quote from one of my favorite authors, Pearl S. Buck. She said:
“One faces the future with one’s past.”
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I’ve been spending the past few days working in Cupertino in the heart of Silicon Valley. As I look out my hotel room window, I can see below me the headquarters of Apple and Symantec. This evening, I took a short drive to see the headquarters of Adobe, Google, HP, Intel, Yahoo and a few others (OK, I was bored and a little geeked out by being here). Spending time at the epicenter of the tech community had me asking the question, “If agile has really gone mainstream, how many of these tech companies are using agile practices, and if they are using agile, how are they doing?” When I got back to my hotel room, I Googled “agile adoption rates” and came across a survey that Scott Ambler did in March 2007 about the rate of agile adoption. Scott received 781 responses to his interview and published his findings on his website and in Dr. Dobb’s. According to Scott, his key findings were:
