Usage and Perceptions of Agile Software Development in an Industrial

Short Description
Agile development methodologies have been gaining acceptance in the mainstream software development community. While there are numerous studies of Agile development in academic and educational settings, there has been little detailed reporting of the usage, penetration and success of Agile methodologies in traditional, professional software development organizations. We report on the results of an empirical study conducted at Microsoft to learn about Agile development and its perception by people in development, testing, and management. We found that one-third of the study respondents use Agile methodologies to varying degrees, and most view it favorably due to improved communication between team members, quick releases and the increased flexibility of Agile designs. The Scrum variant of Agile methodologies is by far the most popular at Microsoft. Our findings also indicate that developers are most worried about scaling Agile to larger projects (greater than twenty members), attending too many meetings and the coordinating Agile and non-Agile teams.

Website: research.microsoft.com | Filesize: 286kb
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Content
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Agile software development (ASD) methodologies [7] have been gaining acceptance among mainstream software developers since the late 1990s, when they were first postulated in the forms of Scrum [14], Crystal [8], Extreme Programming [4] and other methodologies. Today they are established to varying degrees in the academic, educational and professional software development communities.
We would like to understand how ASD methodologies are used, what kind of acceptance and spread they have, and what kind of successes and failures occur in each of these communities. We believe strongly in using empirical methods to explore questions engendered by these research topics. While there is much to be learned from looking at the software artifacts created by developers and from measuring developer productivity and software failure proneness, we can gain great insights through direct interaction with software developers. We can learn about their development practices, their perceptions of development processes, and how the two interact. We conducted a web-based survey of Microsoft employees in development, testing and management roles who are directly involved in the production of software. Our questions were targeted to understand respondents’ demographics, ASD usage, penetration of ASD practices, and their perceptions of why ASD works well or poorly on their software teams. We received a response rate of 17%; the nearly 500 responses make it one of the largest respondent populations for a survey of software development at Microsoft. From these responses, we gained a fairly clear picture of how ASD is used at Microsoft. Our findings indicate that around one-third of the respondents use ASD. Scrum is the most popular ASD methodology. ASD is a relatively new phenomenon to Microsoft; most projects have employed Agile for less than two years. ASD is used mostly by collocated teams who work on the same floor of the same building. Finally, ASD users have an overwhelmingly positive opinion about it. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we discuss our contributions and in Section 3 review the related research. Section 4 describes the experimental methodology and illustrates the results. In Section 5, we discuss the benefits and problems of ASD as perceived at Microsoft. Section 6 concludes with a review of our most important findings and their implications for future research here at Microsoft and at other sites.
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