The Big Agile Practices Survey

15 April 2009

Posted in Top Lists

There are several agile surveys, most notably those of VersionOne and Scott Ambler.

However, while those surveys are very useful, neither of them has given me an answer to some very important questions.

Questions that I care deeply about…

Which practices are the most important for agile projects?
Which practices are most often linked to agile development?
Which practices are most widely applied in agile projects?

Those are the questions I want to find an answer to. Some practices are considered "agile" by everyone, but nobody is applying them. While other practices are not really considered "agile", yet most people seem to be using them. Things like that are what we all want to know, right?

In my post The Big List of Agile Practices I listed all (best documented) agile practices that I could find. And several people helped me with corrections and suggestions. (Thanks everyone!) Now it is time to ask people to fill out the forms…

Please follow each of these links and click the checkboxes!

Agile Requirements (10 practices)
Agile Design (7 practices)
Agile Construction (14 practices)
Agile Testing (7 practices)
Agile Process (19 practices)
Agile Organization (10 practices)

NOTE: You don't have to answer questions for all practices. Simply skip the ones that don't mean anything to you. (The number of times a practice is skipped is also meaningful data!)

ALSO NOTE: Every question/practice has the same 6 possible answers. You can click any number of checkboxes that you want. If you cannot decide, then don't click.

ALSO ALSO NOTE: This is an anonymous survey. I'm not asking you for your name, job title, email address, or anything else. I only want to know about your opinion on practices. That's all.

ALSO ALSO ALSO NOTE: If you want an explanation for any of the practices, go to The Big List of Agile Practices. There you can find links to multiple descriptions on different web sites.

This survey is NOT about your company's size, industries and other boring stuff. It is about the things that are most dear to us:

Which practices are really agile?
Which practices are really important?
Which practices are really applied?

Please help me by tweeting, digging and bookmarking this survey until it's seeing blue. The results of this survey are free for all, and immediately available! But for the results to make any sense, we need hundreds of people to fill out these forms. I can really use your help with that!

Thank you all…

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