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Here are some important points from Diego Lo Guidice’s recent Continuous Delivery Conference keynote that covers the barriers and best practices for scaling Agile development:
“A number of common challenges prevent Agile from being as successful or scaled as widely as we would like. In Forrester’s 2015 State of Agile Development study, both large and small firms cited the following as the top 3 barriers to Agile adoption:
Not surprisingly, “Agile expert firms”—firms that have successfully scaled Agile practices to more than half of their teams— have determined how to work through common adoption barriers more effectively than “Agile neophytes”:
The same survey also asked “What core Agile practices do you apply?” Results for upstream activities (activities that remove the barriers between business and the development teams) were:
The study also revealed that only 13% of respondents used at least one Agile technique and interestingly, 54% mixed different Agile techniques and 27% deliberately mixed Agile and non-Agile techniques. Clearly, there are hybrid approaches emerging in the real world. The most popular methods are Scrum, iterative, Kanban, DevOps and Lean. The most popular hybrid method is waterfall and Agile mixed, “WaterScrumFall.”
For downstream activities (activities that remove the barrier between development, test, and operations), results indicated that:
This question arises every year: Why Agile? What are the real tangible benefits? Forrester’s research points to the following from their report on Agile and state of the art testing methods. Agile isn’t about making software easy or cheaper to developer but rather achieve better outcomes with the amount of time, effort and money poured into the development:
Some positive news from the study indicated that testers are becoming peers to developers and first class citizens of the Agile process. As an organization’s test capability matures, testing becomes a critical function and testers need to be part of the team as peers. Clearly, the leading organizations are making testers part of an integrated team. They don’t have a test center of excellence decoupled from development. Testers are truly part of the team.
Parasoft’s industry-leading automated software testing tools support the entire software development process, from when the developer writes the first line of code all the way through unit and functional testing, to performance and security testing, leveraging simulated test environments along the way.