Results of Agile GIS Survey

March 13th, 2008 · 1 Comment · Surveys and Stats

Well, the polls have closed, the results have been tallied, cross-tabulated and graphed for the Agile GIS Survey 2008 (and unlike the Democratic primary race here in the U.S., we have a conclusion). A complete whitepaper detailing the survey results and conclusions is available here. A summary of the survey results is available here. A version of the whitepaper has also been published by Directions Magazine on their website and is available here.

Overall the survey was a huge success. We gathered 347 responses from GIS professionals from 36 countries. Here are some of the highlights:

Of 347 respondents, 32% said their organization had adopted any agile practices, 68% said they had not. This compares to 69% of the mainstream development world that has adopted agile practices according to Scott Ambler’s survey asking the same question in 2007.

But don’t despair. There is good news. Although the general agile adoption rate is lower amongst GIS developers than mainstream developers, once they do adopt agile practices, they do so pretty much in the same fashion as everyone else does. And more good news, of the respondents who indicated that their organizations had adopted agile practices, 86% indicated that they have used agile on at least 2 projects. This means that agile practices are moving beyond the pilot stage for the GIS development teams that are doing agile.

Within the GIS development population, there are definite differences in how different practices are adopted based on organization size and organizational experience with agile practices.

Another key finding was related to coaching and training. The survey indicated that 49% of Expert teams (those who have run more than 20 agile projects) have received agile training as compared to 0% of Rookies (1 agile project), 8% of Learning Curve teams (2-5 agile projects), and 14% of Mature teams (5-20 agile projects). Agile coaching displayed a similar trend in that 29% of Experts have used agile coaches to help improve and accelerate their agile adoption while 0% of Rookies, 3% of Learning Curves, and 14% of Mature teams have done the same.

So, at the risk of writing too much here beyond highlights, download the whitepaper and the results summary and check it out for yourself. If you’re interested in more detailed results that you can run your own analyses on, please contact me directly.

I would like to thank the following individuals and organizations for their promotion of the Agile GIS Survey: James Fee of Spatially Adjusted and Planet Geospatial , Adena Schutzberg of Directions Magazine, Hilary Perkins of URISA and DTS, Glenn Letham of The AnyGeo Blog, Ron Exler of the GeoFactor, and Agile Commons. I would also like thank Ryan Martens of Rally Software Development for independently reviewing and commenting on the results of this study.

1 comment so far ↓

1 Rodney // Aug 27, 2009 at 12:28 pm

There is a classic book about how cultures development & some thrive more than others, and big part is explaining reasons for varying adoption rates of new ideas and new technology. The book came out in 1997 and PBS broadcast a miniseries of it in 2005. (My local library has it on DVD.)
The book is Guns, Germs, and Steel and the author is Jared Diamond. Wikipedia has articles about both.

One of the big factors in slower adoption is ISOLATION.
How much interaction (trading, etc.) does Culture A have with other cultures? A more-isolated individual, group, or culture has less access to ideas originated by others, so they lag behind.
What does this have to do with GIS?
Many people start using GIS while working in another field (civil engineering, botany, real estate, etc.), with no background in IT, other than maybe 1 or 2 programming courses, or reading a book or two. Self-taught developers may have never even heard of software engineering, so they think cowboy coding is normal.
Don’t ask their job title, ask how much background do they have in IT, and how much interaction do they have with IT professionals outside of GIS.
Jack Dangermond says that GIS is becoming more integrated into the enterprise systems, so maybe the isolation will decrease.