In the coming months, I’ll be conducting interviews with leaders in the GIS industry discussing their level of agile adoption. However, today I found two new polls on the Directions Magazine website which give an insight into what the GIS market is doing with agile. The first poll examined the level of knowledge GIS professionals had in terms of agile product/software management knowledge. The results showed that only 28% of the 36 respondents are using agile practices (and what that means can be kind of nebulous). The astonishing figure is that 31% of the industry has never heard of agile. This may help answer Dave Bouwman’s and my questions about why the GIS industry is slow in adopting agile practices.
The results of this poll stand in sharp contrast to the level of agile adoption in the broader software development world. According to an August 2006 survey by Version One, 84% of the 722 respondents indicated that their company had adopted Agile development practices somewhere within their software organization. A similar survey conducted by Digital Focus last year concluded that 81% of the 136 executives they surveyed were either actively using Agile development methodologies within their organization or looking for opportunities to do so. This makes two clear points:
- Agile is rapidly gaining acceptance as the primary tool in today’s mainstream application development world
- GIS software development is lagging behind mainstream development when it comes to agile adoption
To hammer home this point, Mary Poppendieck gave a keynote speech about the state of agile adoption at the Agile Development Practices conference called “Welcome to the Mainstream”. Mary concluded that agile has crossed the chasm and is now part of mainstream software development. She used Geoffrey Moore’s classic product adoption diagram to illustrate where agile practices are in the general software development adoption curve. I’d like to modify the product adoption diagram further to illustrate where I believe GIS agile adoption is today as follows:
The second poll asked a question about what type of educational course GIS professionals would choose. The significant result here is that the second highest response was “Project Management” at 16%. This agrees with what I have repeatedly heard at the conclusion of nearly every ESRI Users Conference I’ve attended in the past 10 years. Every year, Jack Dangermond asks conference attendees what they want more of in the conference for the next year. Without fail, someone always says “Project management” which is usually met by big applause from the audience.
I believe that these two results taken in combination provide some great insight into two areas of the GIS industry that need real help: Agile adoption and project management. What I really think is that the GIS world is ready to begin it’s journey down the path toward accepting agile project management practices to start producing valuable, quality software for our end users.
To meet that need in the GIS market place Data Transfer Solutions is going to begin offering agile project management and software development training and coaching in 2008. With the breadth of knowledge we have accumulated through our own agile adoption, we’d like to work to help bring the rest of the GIS into the mainstream fold of agile project management and software development. If you’re interested in training or assistance in getting your agile adoption underway, please feel free to contact either myself or Dave Bouwman.
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