Dr. Dobb's Journal - June 2008 - (Page 54)

d06ambler_p3as 4/11/08 11:34 AM Page 54 Instantly Search Terabytes of Text N dozens of indexed, unindexed, fielded The Survey WE SENT E-MAIL to our readership requesting that people fill out the survey and we had 642 responses. We had a wide range of respondents: • • • • • • • • • 54.8% indicated that they were developers 29.4% were in management positions 41.6% had between 10 and 20 years IT experience 37.2% had more than 20 years IT experience 71.0% were from North America 17.0% were from Europe 4.5% were from Asia 34.9% worked in organizations of 100 people or less 37.7% worked in organizations of 1000+ people data and full-text search options (including Unicode support for hundreds of international languages) N file parsers / converters for hit-highlighted display of all popular file types N Spider supports static and dynamic web data; highlights hits while displaying links, formatting and images intact N API supports .NET, C++, Java, databases, etc. New .NET Spider API The experience levels indicate to me that the majority of people should have a reasonably good idea what is happening in their IT departments. There was also a good range of organization sizes represented. The only challenge was the over representation of North Americans, which has been an issue with previous surveys as well. —S.W.A. Colocated teams where everyone, including stakeholders, are in the same work area enjoyed an average success rate of 83 percent. Non-colocated teams where people are in different cubes, perhaps on different floors, or in different buildings, where they could easily get together physically if required, had a 72 percent average success rate. Projects where part of the team was at a significantly different location, such as offshoring situations, had a 60 percent average success rate. We asked about these three different scenarios to try to determine the risk premium associated with team distribution, and as you see it’s fairly high—a 23 percent difference in success rates between co-location and being highly distributed. Overall survey respondents indicated that the average success rate for agile teams was 77 percent. Organizations still in the pilot project phase had an 84 percent success rate when colocated, 72 percent when not colocated, 61 percent with highly distributed, and a 79 percent overall success rate. I was a bit surprised that the success rate for the Agile pilot projects was so high. Usually teams that are trying new techniques run into trouble and the project turns into a “learning experience” for the organization. Part of the high success rate is likely attributable to organizations choosing easier projects to pilot Agile techniques on. Also, better people usually staff pilot teams, so that would lead to a higher success rate. We also wanted to get a feel for how effective agile teams are in practice, so we asked about productivity, quality, stakeholder satisfaction, and cost. Table 2 summarizes the results. As you can see, Agile teams are reporting significant improvements in productivity, quality, and stakeholder satisfaction, and reasonable improvements in cost. The interesting thing is that the upside of adopting agile approaches is fairly high, yet the downside is low. In short, becoming more agile appears to be low-risk decision for senior IT management. h Spider Desktop wit h Spider Network wit CD/DVDs Publish for ider Web with Sp Win & .NET Engine for Linux Engine for New 64-bit The Laggards May Still Catch Up We found that Agile software development strategies are being successfully adopted by the majority of organizations. Most organizations are moving beyond the pilot phase and are applying agile approaches on many project teams, and some are even applying agile at scale. Agile adoption may have peaked, or perhaps we’re just seeing a lull before the “adoption laggards,” as Geoffrey Moore likes to call them, finally decide to catch up to the rest of the marketplace. As with previous surveys, the source data (without identifying information), the original questions as they were asked, and a set of summary slides are downloadable from www.ambysoft.com/surveys/. I invite you to analyze the results for yourself. DDJ The Smart Choice for Text Retrieval ® since 1991 N “Bottom line: dtSearch manages a terabyte of text in a single index and returns results in less than a second” – InfoWorld N “For combing through large amounts of data,” dtSearch “leads the market” – Network Computing N dtSearch “covers all data sources powerful Web-based engines”– eWEEK N dtSearch “searches at blazing speeds” – Computer Reseller News Test Center See www.dtsearch.com for hundreds more reviews, and hundreds of developer case studies Contact dtSearch for fully-functional evaluations Scott is Practice Leader Agile Development for IBM Rational. 1-800-IT-FINDS www.dtsearch.com 54 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l June 2008 http://www.ambysoft.com/surveys/ http://www.dtsearch.com http://www.dtsearch.com http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - June 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - June 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries There Must Be Contest Conversations Building a Test Harness for RTOS QT and Windows CE Software to Hardware Parallelization Performance Portable C++ Effective Concurrency The Agile Edge Swaine's Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - June 2008

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