2018 and 2019 Surveys

Agile Now in the Era of Digitalization

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2018 and 2019 surveys were conducted in Finland 2018 and in Sweden in 2019 by Nitor, University of Helsinki and Blekinge Institute of Technology.

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https://www.nitor.com/en/news-and-blogs/nitor-surveying-state-agile-finland-together-university-helsinki

https://www.nitor.com/en/news-and-blogs/how-agile-sweden

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This survey questionnaire included three main sections: Company's state of Agile, Agile company transformation and Agile future of the company. The questionnaire comprised some 50 questions addressing those aspects of agile developments and agility in organizations. There were both multiple choice questions as well as open comment fields, so the survey have produced a lot of both quantitative and qualitative data.

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The selected highlights of the results and findings in the published research articles are:

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• The majority of the respondents indicated that their organizations have conducted agile transformations or are currently doing so. Most reported that their company has had external consultants to assist in the change.

• Scrum, Kanban and DevOps are widely used. Operative productivity and quality were reported most often to be the reason for becoming (more) agile. Operational measurements appear to be the most typical ones, but strikingly a large share indicated follow-up of no particular metrics. The respondents considered both the impacts of digitalization and the correspondence of agile developments in their companies substantial.

• The biggest benefits reported with Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) were transparency, co-operation, and cadence. Mixing old and new ways of working and implementing only a subset of the SAFe practices caused trouble.

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The results were published in various media:

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• in Nitor Blog: Finnish companies are pioneers in agile methods, https://nitor.com/en/articles/study-nitor-and-university-helsinki-finnish-companies-are-pioneers-agility 

• XP 2019 7th International Workshop on Large-Scale Agile Development (LargeScaleAgile)

  • Finnish Enterprise Agile Transformations: A Survey Study (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30126-2_12)

  • SAFe Adoptions in Finland: A Survey Research (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30126-2_10) 

• PROFES 2019 conference article that got nomination as a candidate for the best research paper

  • Agile in the Era of Digitalization: A Finnish Survey Study (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35333-9_28)

• ICSOB 2020​

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Biggest learning points in these surveys have been so far:

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1. There were no companies who would have gone back from agile methods (https://www.nitor.com/en/news-and-blogs/study-nitor-and-university-helsinki-finnish-companies-are-pioneers-agility)

2. Companies seem to use mixed models, whatever best suits to their needs (Finnish Enterprise Agile Transformations: A Survey Study) and this was talked about in the 7th XP International Workshop in 2019

3. In general, the SAFe and LeSS models are considered as useful (SAFe Adoptions in Finland: A Survey Research)

4. Transparency is one of the early benefits of adoption of agile methods (PROFES 2019)

5. Many companies do not set measures for agile adoption nor measure Feature cycle-times systematically needs (Finnish Enterprise Agile Transformations: A Survey Study)

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Looking world through the data is exiting!

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We will be conducting more surveys in the future.