This year we saw further evidence that agile is not a fad. More than half of our respondents said they’ve personally practiced agile for over 2 years, and one-third have carried agile with them to another company. Almost two-thirds of respondents said that up to half of their company’s projects were run using agile, and that their company has adopted agile practices across 3 or more teams.

While there were slightly elevated concerns over agile scaling, regulatory compliance and a lack of documentation, there was less pushback from management this year in considering deploying agile. Furthermore, 64% of initial agile champions are in the management layer. Accelerating time to market is again the number-one reason for agile adoption (22%).

Despite the uptick in management support for agile, survey results suggest that the greatest barrier to increased adoption of agile appears not to be awareness of the methodology, but internal company cultures. Only 13% of respondents in larger organizations (more than 500 employees) said that nearly all their projects used agile. In these larger companies, respondents said that lack of management support (27%) and "general resistance to change" (26%) were major barriers to agile adoption. Conversely, among smaller companies, the vast majority (nearly 75%) of projects used agile and only 10% of respondents cited lack of management support or “general resistance to change” as an issue or barrier to adoption.

We saw a continued practice of daily standup meetings (78%), iteration planning (74%) and unit testing (70%). The most notable trend this year was the increased use of Kanban principles (24% versus 18% in 2010). By far, Scrum/Scrum XP continues to lead the pack as the most used agile methodology (66%).

This year there was a shift in the benefits companies gleaned from agile. In 2010, respondents said it was all about productivity (74%). This year productivity improved for 75% of respondents, but the bigger benefit areas were the ability to manage changing customer priorities (84%) and project visibility (77%). Cost reduction and the ability to manage distributed teams proved the least beneficial. Overall, three-quarters of respondents said that at least half their agile projects had been successful.

The 2011 survey also showed an uptick in the number of companies who do not currently practice agile but plan to in the future (17% this year versus 13% last year). Of those already practicing agile, one-third will continue to do so, and only 3% said they do not plan to continue.

The most common types of tools currently being used (or planned) include: Automated Acceptance Tools (20%), Release Management Tools (16%) and Continuous Integration Tools (16%). Interestingly, the agile tool being used the least today is also the most desired tool of tomorrow – Ideas Management Tool.

In terms of specific agile software tools, most are using standard office productivity tools such as Excel, followed by specialized tools like VersionOne. The use of bug trackers has also come on strong this year (14%).