If Agile Were to Go Mainstream

[John Salch]

I found this interesting article on the Cutter Blog:

http://blog.cutter.com/2008/01/16/if-agile-were-to-go-mainstream

So what have I found? Here are some of the highlights:

* Agile teams have metrics. The perception might be that Agile
teams are a bunch of undisciplined programmers slinging code and not
documenting anything. Not true. They know their schedules (time), keep
records of team members working on their projects (effort), they count
requirements and things called iterations and stories (a size metric),
and they keep track of bugs (defects).
* We easily draw this out along with their velocity charts on a
whiteboard sketch. This profile is all we need to capture the measures
and load them into a computer database.
* Agile trends can be plotted on a chart where a picture says a
thousand words (or in this case, metrics). Smaller releases, medium-
sized releases, and large releases are charted from left to right.
Vertically, we can chart the schedules, team size, and defects found
and fixed.
* As a group, the projects were mostly faster than average. About
80% were below the industry average line. Note that some took longer,
for several reasons (too long to explain here). Some companies
developed software in two-thirds or even half the time.
* They used larger than average teams. Even though many of the
smaller releases used small teams, some -- apparently in response to
deadline pressure -- used large numbers of people. One company applied
seven parallel Scrum teams totaling 95 people, where the norm was
about 40 people.
* On waterfall projects, the "laws of software physics" showed a
predictable outcome of large teams trying to create fast schedules --
high defect rates (sometimes 4x-6x). On Agile projects, we saw a
shockingly low number of defects -- in some of the companies. The best
performer had high-maturity XP teams. These project teams showed
defects that were 30% to 50% lower than average. Other less-mature
Agile teams had defect rates that were more like waterfall projects.