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

The Agile Impact Report: Proven Performance Metrics from the Agile Enterprise Conducted by QSM Associates Executive Overview In May 2008, Rally Software commissioned third-party research firm QSM Associates (QSMA) to assess the performance of Agile development projects against plan-based or waterfall industry averages in three key areas: productivity, time-to-market and quality. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the performance of companies that have implemented Agile development practices and utilized them throughout the entire lifecycle. QSMA benchmarked 26 Agile development projects – eight of which were executed by Rally customers – against a database of 7,500 primarily traditional development projects. QSMA concluded that, as compared to industry averages, the development teams utilizing Agile practices were on average: � � • 37 percent faster delivering their software to market • 16 percent more productive • Able to maintain normal defect counts despite significant schedule compression Rally initiated the study to provide software-driven organizations with proven metrics – supported by actual project examples – that accurately measure the performance of Agile development projects across the enterprise. Background Objectives and Study Methodology QSMA used its SLIM (Software Lifecycle Management) suite of benchmarking, software estimation and modeling tools to obtain objective data and benchmark Agile development projects against QSMA's large, heterogeneous database. The SLIM-Metrics database represents over 7,500 projects across 500 organizations in 18 countries and adds between 200 and 400 projects per year. The objectives of the study were to: • Assess the performance of Agile development projects across enterprise teams • Benchmark Agile projects (both those that used Rally’s Agile lifecycle management solutions and those that did not) against plan-based or waterfall industry averages for time and effort • Measure the projects with respect to time-to-market and productivity/quality and benchmark the approach to consider automating ongoing measurement The measured projects included in the “Agile Impact” study represent a variety of industries and project sizes with sixty to over a thousand Agile practitioners. Read the entire Agile Impact Report Download at: www.rallydev.com/ ddjimpactreport Agile’s Impact on Time-to-Market Agile Projects are 37% Faster to Market than Industry Average; Rally Projects are 50% Faster Software development teams, especially when they have large and geographically dispersed teams, often struggle to deliver their software on time. By adopting Agile practices, companies measured in this study were able to produce large-scale enterprise software in four to eleven months, compared to the six to thirteen months a typical organization required to deliver comparable software. Overall, Agile companies experience an average increase in speed of 37 percent. Rally customers who participated in the study saw an average increase of 50 percent in their time-to-market when compared to the industry average. Especially noteworthy is the fact that Agile processes succeed in spite of teams being large and geographically dispersed. According to QSMA’s data, many companies with distributed teams experience longer schedules, but the companies involved in the study with globally dispersed teams, did not. According to Rally’s own customers, this success is due in large part to the use of Rally’s Agile lifecycle management products. http://www.rallydev.com/ddjimpactreport http://www.rallydev.com/ddjimpactreport

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

Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer's Notebook Saving Open Source Conversations iPhone Building Your Own Web Server Green Telnet What's New In Boost Threads? Testing Service Oriented Architectures Test Case Generation, UML, and Eclipse Unit Testing Web Services C3 Programming The Agile Edge Swaine's Flames Effective Concurrency

Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008

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