I’m very excited to be teaming up with Margo Visitacion on the biennial Forrester State of Agile At Scale Survey. This year, we’ve added a few more questions in areas that we see organizations struggle. In addition to successful Agile team practices and alignment with business stakeholders upstream and downstream with testing/operations, we are now looking into more Agile-at-scale issues such as budgeting, financials, value stream management (VSM), and DevOps.

In 2017, some Agile scaling frameworks, including SAFe, decreased in adoption. Will that trend be confirmed in 2019? How are the growing popularity of unicorn Agile approaches like Spotify doing? Software development leaders continue to buy into Agile while eradicating traditional waterfall development; meanwhile, business leaders continue to gain more interest in Agile. In the last version of this survey in 2017, we found the biggest struggle to be behavioral change, with 51% of the respondents telling us so. The second-biggest problem, for 41% of survey takers, was lack of product owner skills in the business, and a third (33%) declared incompatibility of their funding and budgeting processes with Agile to be a major issue. In addition, leading innovator teams, which we called Agile expert firms, have quickly turned passion projects into Agile success stories. But enterprises don’t just need to be quick and flexible on net-new projects or only at the individual team level; they need speed across the business and end to end on their customer journeys.

As software teams mature along their Agile transformation, the biggest obstacle is still, despite some improvements, scaling up and horizontally. This means truly linking Agile initiatives, design thinking, and DevOps with business value. What exactly has happened in the last two years? We need your help to substantiate that with data. Our biennial independent Agile survey tracking the health of Agile initiatives for 2019 keeps its focus on the main challenge: Agile at scale.

What do you get from taking the survey? A free copy of the resulting Forrester report on the state of Agile at scale, to publish in Q3 2019!

Who should take the survey? Anyone who is currently on an Agile, DevOps, or especially Agile+DevOps adoption journey — from beginners to advanced practitioners, those going from small-scale to large-scale Agile adoption — who can share with us their company, division, or team experience. More specifically:

  • Software product vendors, systems integrators, and consultants.
  • End user companies in any vertical sector, public and private.
  • Located in any geography.

We are asking questions about Agile methods and practices, expectations vs. achievements, Agile scaling status, Agile testing and delivery, outsourcing Agile, metrics, and organization practices.

The survey takes about 15 minutes to complete.

We appreciate your help. If you have any questions, please reach out to Andrew Dobak at adobak@forrester.com.

Thanks,

Diego Lo Giudice