Trends on Agile Development

Methodologies and challenges in Agile Development

Lucman Abdulrachman ([email protected])

https://www.global-integration.com/

“The Agile management revolution is transforming the world of work” – Steve Denning

In current business situation, surrounded by competitors and demanding customers, it’s becoming
necessity for organization to work efficiently and deliver more value. The recent Annual State of
Agile Report (14th) shows that 95% of respondents practice Agile Development Methodologies
mostly to accelerate software delivery and enhance ability to manage changing priorities [1]. Being
Agile is the ability to create and respond to change. It is a way of dealing with, and ultimately
succeeding in, an uncertain and turbulent environment [3].

But still, the struggle for adopting agile is real, embedding agility in software development is not as
simple as big tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook might make it look like.
The reality is that for most organizations adopting agile is hard, and they end up making mistakes.
The survey conducted by Net Solutions on Agile Product Development 2020 with 601 respondents
shows that 62.2% organization leaders believed that their team do not have a complete
understanding of Agile development and the value it provides to their organization [2].

Agile Development Adoption

The 14th Annual State of Agile Report shows that 95% of respondents practice Agile Development
Methodologies.

However, 82% of respondents indicated that not all of their company’s teams have adopted Agile
practices signaling that there is still growth to come for Agile adoption [1]. The result expresses
that Agile Development is predominantly implemented in the software or information technology
industry but not limited to software organizations.

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Agile Methods and Practices
The 14th State of Agile survey shows that Scrum and related variants continue to be the most
common Agile methodologies used by respondents’ organizations.

As SCRUM and related variants leads to be the most commonly used methodology, it also extends
on the top 5 Agile practices were the practices of SCRUM Framework such as daily-standup,
Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, Retrospectives, and short iterations.

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Agile Product Development 2020 Industry Survey Report by Net Solutions states that Businesses
are undoubtedly realizing the value that the Agile product development approach delivers. This
statement is confirmed by the fact that 99.3% of the surveyed organizations have adopted the
Agile process or are experimenting with it [2].

Among the most popular Agile approaches that surveyed leaders selected, a hybrid (Waterfall +
Agile) is the most preferred approach (31%), followed by the custom version (29.2%) and Scrum
(20.6%) respectively [2].

Engineering Practices
According 14th State of Agile Report, in software development, best practices such as Unit Testing,
Coding Standards, Continuous Integration (CI) were the top 3 software development practices
being used by IT organizations.

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Use of DevOps in Organizations

One of the most important practices necessary for agile development team is implementing
DevOps practices to improve the Value Stream Management (VSM).

In the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, survey takers are asked about the importance of
DevOps to scaling software development. Almost 80% of respondents believed that DevOps is at
least somewhat important, with almost half of the respondents noting that it is extremely important
[4].

While in 14th State of Agile survey report shows that 90% of respondents said DevOps
transformation was important in their organization [1].

76% of respondents stated that they currently have a DevOps initiative in their organization or are
planning one in the next 12 months [1].

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Challenges in Agile Development
Struggle on understanding Agile Development and its benefits

The Agile Product Development 2020 Industry Survey Report by Net Solutions states that 66.2%
of the surveyed leaders believe that
their teams do not have a complete
understanding of Agile development
and the value it provides to their
organization. In fact, 4.4% of the
business leaders admitted that their
teams have no understanding of Agile
development.

Net Solutions suggests to take Agile

development as not just a default
process; rather, it’s a mindset.
Leadership should reach out and
engage their team early and often,
taking the right steps to build a CX-
driven product, at speed and scale
[2].

According Dr Ahmed Sidky (Doctor Agile),

Agile is a mindset that is described by four agile manifesto values and grounded by 12 principles
and manifested through unlimited number of practices. And the agility becomes limited when these
practices are made limited. When all these practices are bundled together then they define a
framework or methodology i.e. Scrum [5].

Challenges on Adopting and Scaling Agile Development

The 14th State of Agile survey report states that the highest-ranked challenges to adopting and
scaling Agile continue to be related to organizational culture. General organizational resistance to
change, inadequate management support and sponsorship, and organizational culture at odds with
Agile values remain in the top 5 challenges. A new choice this year, not enough leadership
participation, also ranked in the top 5 [1].

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The Agile Product Development 2020 Industry Survey Report by Net Solutions states that
regardless of how long an organization has
been following an Agile product development
methodology, lack of product alignment with
the target market, customer, and strategy is
consistently the biggest perceived challenge
among surveyed business leaders (40%).

They also discovered that 34% of the

businesses name an undefined process as
the biggest challenge in their Agile product
development journey. This finding highlights
our view that this roadblock is an operating
model challenge influenced by operations
and processes, technological challenges such as Continuous Integration (CI)/Continuous Delivery
(CD), and performance management [2].

Conclusion
As the pandemic continues to challenge world of work, organizations are coerced to refashion and
align their approach to product/software development by adopting agility in their development
processes blending agile practices such as DevOps, CI/CD to improve Value Stream
Management.

Understanding Agile Development is still a struggle in corporate organizations that were used to
traditional approach such as waterfall. Adopting Agile for these organizations is a challenge due to
resistances to change.

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According Ahmed Sidky, this is because organizations treat Agile as a processes and tools making
it complicated to adapt. Rather Agile should be treated as Mindset. Agile is a mindset.
Organizations should begin by adapting agile from organizational culture by establishing agile
manifesto values and principles as part of daily habits and attitudes at work. When Agile practices
are scaled across organizations, the benefits are realized by everyone.

References:
1. 14th Annual State of Agile Report, August to December 2019
https://explore.digital.ai/state-of-agile/14th-annual-state-of-agile-report
2. Net Solutions
Agile Product Development 2020 Industry Report
3. Agile 101
https://www.agilealliance.org/agile101/
4. Stack Overflow
2020 Developer Survey
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020
5. Ahmed Sidky
Agile Mindset
http://www.softed.com/assets/Uploads/Resources/Agile/The-Agile-Mindset-Ahmed-
Sidky.pdf
6. Steve Denning
Understanding the Agile Mindset
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2019/08/13/understanding-the-agile-mindset/?
sh=4d38d9ac5c17