Survey on agile and lean usage in finnish software industry

Earlier empirical studies have demonstrated the interest that agile methods have generated in the software industry. Currently, lean approaches are increasingly adopted for complementing agile methods in software processes. With the goal of providing up-to-day results that can be used by organizations implementing or planning to implement agile and/or lean methods, we have conducted a study on the current stage of agile and lean adoption and usage in the software industry. For this purpose, we conducted an extensive survey among Finnish software practitioners in 2011, using the membership registry of The Finnish Information Processing Association (FIPA)as a sampling frame. 408 responses were collected from 200 software intensive organizations in the study. The survey included questions for identifying the rate of agile and lean usage in software organizations as well as the implementation of specific methods and practices, goals in adopting agile and lean, reasons for not applying these methods and effects of the agile and lean usage. The results of the survey reveal that a majority of respondents´ organizational units are using agile and/or lean methods (58%). Furthermore, lean appears as a new player, being used by 24% of respondents, mainly in combination with agile (21%). The reasons and benefits for using agile and lean methods appeared to correspond in most parts to the findings of the earlier research. Generally, the experiences of using agile and lean methods seem to be rather positive, although challenges, such as obtaining management support and limitations for scaling agile in distributed settings, were also identified.