The Big Agile Practices Survey Report (Part 3)

11 May 2009

Posted in Top Lists

This is Part 3 (<< go back to Part 1 | << go back to Part 2)

In this survey people were able to add comments. Few participants made use of that possibility, and most comments I got concerned themselves with the way the survey and the questions were formulated.

Here's a selection of the feedback that I got:

Some people would have preferred more options than just a binary choice between Yes and No. That would have been possible, but it would have made the survey even larger and more complicated.
Some people had difficulty with the dependencies between best practices. For example: code reviews are important IF you're NOT doing pair programming. Otherwise, they are less important.
Some people didn't agree with some best practices being lumped together. For example: they considered user stories and executable requirements to be two different things. They are right, and I'm afraid this was the result of me trying to limit the size of the survey.
Some people didn't know what was meant with "being an agile practice". This could mean both "invented by the agile movement" or "advisable to use in agile environments".
And some people didn't know what was meant with certain practices, or what the differences were between some of them.

I've collected and stored all the feedback. And who knows… maybe in one year I will do this survey again and will try to improve the way the survey is constructed.

In the last part of this report I give you a number of charts, without comments. I hope the pictures speak for themselves, and that they enable you to draw some interesting conclusions about the world's adoption of agile practices.

Note: you can also analyze the data yourself in big on-line sortable tables: here (created by Mario Menger) and here (created by Maciej Gren).