By Linky van der Merwe

The 14^th annual State of Agile report has been published by Digital.ai, formerly known as CollabNet VersionOne. The report documents the experiences of more than 1,100 IT and business professionals across a range of industries and roles worldwide. With 40,000 participants contributing over 14 years, the State of Agile report is the longest running and most widely cited Agile survey in the world and provides global enterprises with comprehensive data to benchmark and guide their Agile practices.

Key findings

Notable findings from the 14^th annual State of Agile report, completed in December 2019, include:

60 percent of respondents have increased speed to market
Risk and compliance continue to trend upward, as the value of identifying and measuring technical risk prior to deployment increased by 54 percent and the importance of automated audit compliance and governance across control points increased by 10 percent over last year.
A significant shift in Agile techniques occurred, as product road-mapping increased nine percent while release planning decreased 11 percent. Drivers for this change may include a general increase in continuous integration/continuous deployment and better-defined program increment planning.
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe^®) continues to be the most popular scaling method cited by respondents, increasing 5 percent over last year and outpacing the number two choice, Scrum@Scale, by 19 percent.
55 percent are planning to implement Value Stream Management (VSM) a combination of people, process, and technology that maps, optimizes, visualizes, measures, and governs business value flow from idea through development and into production.

Interesting demographic analysis is showing that companies with more than 20,000 people were more likely to be practicing Agile for at least five years. While companies with less than 1,000 people continue to mature quickly and are increasingly embracing a broader view of business agility by applying Agile principles to areas of the business outside development, IT, and operations.

How COVID-19 affected Agile adoption

In mid-May 2020, Digital.ai conducted a brief supplemental survey of respondents to learn how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their Agile adoption. The findings reveal:

55% say their company plans to increase the use of Agile in the next 12-14 months. This is an increase of 13 percent over the original survey completed just five months ago.
43% of organizations say their momentum for Agile adoption has increased over the past 90 days, with 15 percent saying it has increased significantly.
33% say they increased or expanded Agile adoption in the last 90 days to help manage distributed teams.

To find out what the survey reveals about Agile methods and practices, Agile benefits, scaling Agile, Agile Project Management tools, success and metrics as well as Devops and Value Stream Management, please download the 14^thState of Agile Report here.