– Miguel Tam, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Serena Software (http://www.serena.com/), says: 


Survey Reveals Communication is Today’s Biggest Agile Challenge;Continuous Delivery is a Hot, Trending Agile Topic


Serena Software today announced the results of a new global survey of IT professionals that focused on the current state of agile software development. The research centered on what is working with regards to agile development methodology, the extent of agile adoption in enterprise IT organizations today, biggest challenges and more. The key findings revealed that development teams have united on agile practices, but lack the communication with customers, operations and other development teams, which slow projects and agile success.


The Serena survey was conducted at the recent Agile 2012 Conferencewhere enterprise IT professionals from around the globe joined to discuss current and best agile development practices. Respondents were polled from a variety of industries. The sampling of participants polled included general attendees and speakers.

This survey offers fascinating insight into the areas of agile IT that are doing well, while revealing where work is needed. In addition to learning about issues pertaining to agile development, such as lack of good communication, for example, we also learned that agile IT is on the rise and of those who have deployed agile projects they are quite satisfied. It’s clear that agile IT should focus on understanding and prioritizing customer demand.

The three key themes that came out of the survey include:


·         Agile is doing well enough, but could be better: The survey shows that agile development practices are still not widely embraced; 49 percent says their company is doing some agile deployment work. However, of those that have deployed, 52 percent reported they are happy with their current agile projects. The survey also shows that 55 percent of respondents are investigating or already doing some form of continuous delivery work, a hot agile topic today.

·         Communication is today’s biggest agile challenge: According to the research, more than 50 percent of respondents indicated that understanding and also prioritizing customer demand needed the most improvement for agile to be successful. Both managers and developers agreed that four of the top five agile roadblocks involved working with other teams and customers.


·         Stakeholders need to be more involved with new release projects: While agile development teams are having success, survey respondents feel that upstream and downstream stakeholders are left out the communication loop with sprints. Even though they are the first in line to respond, IT Operations and Support are involved with less than 40 percent of release plans.