3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile?

Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

Licensed for Distribution

This research note is restricted to the personal use of Tran Duc Long ([email protected]).

Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

ARCHIVED Published 15 November 2019 - ID G00377208 - 35 min read

By Bill Holz, Peter Hyde

Initiatives: Application Development for Technical Professionals

Gartner’s Agile in the Enterprise Surveys reveal the key processes and practices used by
successful agile teams. Application technical professionals working in an agile team should
leverage these proven processes and practices to improve business outcomes.

Overview
Key Findings
■ The top three reasons cited by survey participants for agile adoption are as follows: accelerate
product delivery, improve alignment between IT and business, and better manage changing
priorities.

■ The most successful agile development teams report strong organizational commitment, longer
duration of agile use and the highest adoption of agile technical practices.

■ Participants claiming a high degree of success with their agile implementations have adopted the
technical practices from Extreme Programming (XP) and DevOps. Agile technical practices enable
teams to overcome either low organizational commitment or short duration of agile development,
but not both.

■ Agile isn’t just about “doing development differently”; it’s about doing business differently. Culture
change continues to be the largest impediment to both initial adoption and ongoing success, with
56% of survey participants ranking “shift from a culture of control to one of trust” as the top
challenge for future success.

Recommendations
Application technical professionals seeking to deliver quality applications with increased agility:
https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 1/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

■ Adopt test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration (CI) and automated acceptance
testing (AAT) to improve speed of delivery, predictability and quality. The most successful agile
teams release applications at least every three weeks.

■ Implement continuous learning practices. Pair programming, communities of practice, book clubs,
innovation sprints and hackathons all help to develop proficiency with agile processes and
technical skills. Agile requires continuous development of your capabilities to better support the
goals of the team and the organization.

■ Resist pressure to expand the use of agile too quickly. Take an iterative approach, and extend only
after pilot teams have automated their development pipeline and achieved clear effectiveness
milestones, such as velocity increases and defect reductions.

Analysis
Your organization needs to deliver the right capabilities at the right time, and it must quickly respond
to business opportunities to remain competitive. Because agile methods enable this dexterity, we
continue to see increasing use of agile methods, while use of traditional methods, like waterfall,
continues to gradually decline.

Since 2015, Gartner has been conducting the Agile in the Enterprise Survey of Gartner clients to
better understand how they are using agile development methods. The summary reports for each
year of the Agile in the Enterprise Survey are available for you to view and download (see Note 1). In
the survey, we ask clients questions about the following:

■ Their reasons for adopting agile

■ The challenges constraining their success

■ The agile methods, frameworks and technical practices they use

■ Their commitment to using agile for development

■ Their experiences in scaling agile development to the enterprise

As shown in Figure 1, detailed analysis of the survey data has revealed three key factors that
contribute to the overall success of agile teams:

■ Duration of use of agile methods: Participants identified how long they and their organizations
have been using agile, and how long they have been using each of the agile methodologies, such
as Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban or XP. We categorized those using agile for less than three years as
“low-duration,” and those using agile for more than three years as “high-duration.”

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 2/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

■ Implementation of technical practices: Participants identified which technical practices are

currently in use and what practices are planned for adoption in the future.

■ Organizational commitment to agile: For the purposes of the survey, we chose to categorize
commitment to agile based on the following two characteristics:

■ Overall use of agile by the organization: Participants were asked to choose from two options:

■ Some, but not all, development (i.e., less than 50% of development)

■ All or most development (i.e., 50%, or more, of development)

■ Adoption of an enterprise agile framework (EAF): Examples include Scaled Agile Framework
(SAFe), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) or Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS).

Figure 1. Key Factors for Success: Commitment, Duration of Use and

Technical Practice Adoption

Except where specifically noted, the remainder of this document presents findings from the five years
of Agile in the Enterprise Surveys. This research will help you answer the following question:

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 3/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

What processes and practices most contribute to the success of agile

teams?

Use this information to help identify gaps in current capabilities and to prioritize the adoption of
additional practices that will increase your ability to meet business goals and deliver improved
customer outcomes.

Measuring Success With Agile

In each year of the Gartner Agile in the Enterprise Survey, we have asked the following two questions:

Question 1: How successful has agile development in your organization been so far?

Sixty percent of the 2019 survey participants said that agile development has been successful for
them. Over the five years of the survey, overall success has ranged from a low of 60% to a high of
77% (in 2017).

Question 2: What were, or are, your organization’s top three reasons for adopting agile development?

The ranking by survey participants of the reasons for adopting agile has been the same for each of
the five years of the survey (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Is Agile Enabling Achievement of Business Goals?

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 4/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

Unfortunately, successful adoption of Scrum or Kanban doesn’t guarantee that your implementation
of agile is actually helping your organization achieve the most important goals. An all too common
question asked by Gartner clients is:

“How do we know if our agile adoption is successful?”

Because agile is about satisfying your customers by frequently delivering valuable software, the
answer to this question lies in the reasons why your organization chose to adopt agile. To better

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 5/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

address this query, we added the following question to the survey in 2018:

Question 3: How successful has your organization been in achieving each of the top three reasons
for adopting agile?

Figure 2 shows the number of participants choosing each goal (n = number), and the percentage of
those participants who were successful in achieving the goal for both 2018 and 2019. Roughly 40%
of the participants choosing “accelerated product delivery” and “enhanced ability to manage
changing priorities” have not been successful at achieving those goals.

Learning How to Be Agile

Moving from traditional to agile development methods requires significant change at all levels of the
organization. Enable your organization to meet the stated goals by supporting and championing the
required changes to organizational culture and structure, project management processes, and
technical practices.

In a rush to be productive, technical professionals commonly neglect the innumerable years of

combined real-world agile experience and guidance available to them. Instead, they approach agile
as if no one else has ever successfully adopted it. Or, they convince themselves that their situation is
so “special” that the experience and guidance of others just won’t work for them. For example, Scrum
teams that have never taken the time to read The Scrum Guide commonly describe what they do as
“agile-ish,” “agile-like” or “Scrum, but.”

Agile has a long and colorful history, going back to the 1930s. To expedite adoption and improve
delivery capabilities, agile teams must leverage the wealth of available knowledge. See “Create
Awesome Software Using Agile Practices” to learn more about the agile practices, methods and
frameworks pictured in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Abridged History of Agile

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 6/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

Failure to leverage this wealth of knowledge and experience has left many teams lost in an agile
wilderness — with no guidance on how to safely more forward. Take advantage of all resources at
your disposal: white papers, case studies, blogs, webinars, local agile user groups, book clubs and
hackathons.

Create communities of practice (CoPs) to consolidate knowledge, drive innovation, increase

expertise and share proven practices. Collaborate with your peers across the organization to break
down product silos and traditional functional-department fiefdoms. Learn more about creating a CoP
by reading, “How to Build Successful Communities of Practice for Knowledge Management.”

Duration of Use of Agile Methods

“Duration of use” doesn’t imply an understanding of agile. The survey did not explore the level of
understanding that agile teams have acquired and assimilated as a result of the length of time they
have been developing using agile methodologies.

It is not uncommon to speak with people in organizations who use agile

terminology without actually following the practices.

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 7/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

As is shown in Figure 1, the amount of time you have been using agile can be used as a predictor of
success. However, as Figure 4 illustrates, duration alone does not guarantee success with agile.
Success stems from continually improving, increasing agile knowledge and skills, and adopting
technical practices that enable teams to frequently deliver business value. One constant throughout
the years of the survey is that teams in organizations with high levels of technical practice adoption
and commitment have rated their agile development as the most successful.

Figure 4. Agile Success vs. Duration of Use

As expected, some teams new to agile (i.e., having used it for less than a year) report that their
adoption of agile is not yet meeting expectations. Tuckman’s model of group development (i.e., the
forming-storming-norming-performing model) helps to explain the progress of small empowered
teams. Developing agile fluency requires changes to the development culture. Time, repetition,
metrics and transparency are necessary for technical professionals to break old habits and let new
habits take hold.

Scrum Anti-Patterns
During a call with a Gartner client, the client told us that the team’s daily scrum took over an hour every
day, instead of the stated time box of 15 minutes. By investigating the problem further, we determined:

1. The single Scrum team contained 39 people. The development team is defined in The Scrum Guide
as containing three to nine people.
https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 8/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

2. The daily scrum consisted of a video call between three locations, with two additional people dialing
in from home offices. Whenever possible, members of a Scrum team should be colocated, because
colocation maximizes the ability for team members to collaborate.

3. A project manager directed the meeting and asked each person in turn, “What did you do yesterday,
what will you do today, and what blockers do you have?” Each response was written down onto a
clipboard to be later entered into a log and emailed to management. The daily scrum is an event
owned and run by the self-organizing development team to coordinate activities and collaborate to
achieve the sprint goal.

4. Discussion and interaction were not permitted because they further extended the meeting. Topics
that require further discussion should be deferred until after the scrum. After the scrum is
completed, the people who are needed to discuss the topic should meet.

The situation presented an excellent opportunity for a discussion about the Manifesto for Agile
Software Development and the Scrum framework. Prevent “agile in name only” (AINO) by
understanding the Agile Manifesto and by driving continual improvement with a willingness to challenge
existing practices.

Participants report higher success rates the longer they use agile development methods.
Experienced agile teams learn to use metrics as part of their retrospectives to help identify and
overcome constraints to the team’s agility. Those that don’t learn to inspect and adapt their
processes will continue to struggle, no matter how long they have been doing agile.

Figure 4 raises a logical question: Why do so many participants who have been practicing agile for
three or more years feel that their agile adoption is unsuccessful? From an analysis of the 2019
survey data, we find that these participants are struggling with the other key success factors:

■ Some struggle with low commitment and the challenges of working with other teams that are
using traditional methods.

■ Some lack a robust implementation of technical practices, leading to waste in the form of rework
and defects.

■ Some suffer from both of these issues.

More than half of the participants in the 2019 survey have adopted an EAF, with one-third of those
reporting that their agile adoption is not successful. Adopting an EAF in teams with low experience
and/or a lack of technical practice implementation is not a recipe for success. When enterprises are

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 9/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

scaling agile from individual teams to a “team of teams,” organizational commitment, agile
experience (not just duration of use) and technical practices are absolutely essential.

Develop a successful metrics program by benchmarking the current software development process.
Establishing this benchmark is essential for measuring the success or failure of any future change.
When measuring and monitoring the new process, be sure to obtain the data necessary to evaluate
all aspects of the development process.

For more information about adopting agile methodologies and measuring for success, see the
following documents:

■ “Become an Agile Superhero: Eight Attributes for Success”

■ “Create Awesome Software Using Agile Practices”

■ “10 Ways Your Agile Adoption Will Fail”

■ “Choose the Right Metrics to Drive Your Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery Initiatives”

■ “Improve Scrum Development With Effective Use of Agile Metrics”

Agile Methodologies in Use

Teams new to agile usually start by adopting Scrum. The Scrum framework is the dominant agile
implementation, with approximately 90% of survey participants citing the use of Scrum in one or
more teams in their organization (see Figure 5). We find that agile teams get into trouble when they
follow a specific method, like Scrum, when another method, like Kanban or Lean Startup, might be
the better choice for the current situation. As agile maturity increases, don’t be afraid to leverage
other methodologies, like Kanban and Scrumban, when Scrum isn’t the best fit. The biggest change
over the five years of the survey has been the steady increase in Kanban adoption.

Figure 5. Use of Agile Methodologies Spanning All Years of the

Survey

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 10/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

Digging deeper into the data, we find that adoption of Kanban begins with one to five years of agile
use and increases with duration. Sixty-eight percent of those rating their agile development as
successful are using Kanban in addition to other methods like Scrum or Scrumban.

We also find that organizations using agile for most/all application development have significantly
higher use of Scrumban and somewhat higher use of XP. As a methodology, XP is used by very few
organizations, but the technical practices from XP are essential to the frequent delivery of working
software. With the increasing adoption of EAFs, especially SAFe, the use of Scrumban and the
technical practices from XP are expected to increase, because both are crucial capabilities required
for success with SAFe. Note: SAFe makes no mention of Scrumban, but Kanban teams in an agile
release train (ART) will have to honor the sprint boundaries of the Scrum teams in the ART.

For more information about agile methodologies, see the following documents:

■ “Becoming a Better Scrum Master”

■ “Adoption Guide to Second-Generation Agile With Kanban”

■ “Choose Kanban When Scrum Won’t Work”

■ “Accelerate Your DevOps Initiative With Scrumban”

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 11/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

Implementation of Agile Technical Practices

Agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban and Scrumban are simply team-level project management
frameworks that can be used to manage any project. For example, we’ve spoken to CIOs, CEOs and
marketing departments using Scrum to prioritize and manage their work. The CEO of one application
life cycle management (ALM) vendor even told us a story about a customer using the free version of
his company’s agile tools to plan weddings.

Because these team-level agile frameworks strive to support any kind of product development, none
of these agile frameworks (Scrum, Kanban or Scrumban) provide specific practice guidance to help
teams deliver working software frequently. In fact, The Scrum Guide explicitly states:

“Scrum is not a process, technique, or definitive method. Rather, it is a

framework within which you can employ various processes and
techniques.” 1

So, how does an agile team frequently deliver high-quality working software? The answer is to use
the technical practices that were made popular with XP.

Embracing Practices From XP

XP is based on the idea of taking proven engineering practices for development teams to “extreme”
levels. XP, as a complete methodology, is rarely used today (see Figure 5), but its individual technical
practices are beneficial to the application of any software development. As discussed earlier, none of
these technical practices are new:

■ Kent Beck popularized many of these practices in 1999 with his book “Extreme Programming
Explained: Embrace Change.”

■ BDD evolved out of TDD and was defined in 2006 by Dan North in “Introducing BDD.”

■ DevOps was introduced in 2009 by Patrick Debois. It applies agile and XP processes and practices
to the aspects of software delivery that are not explicitly addressed by the Manifesto for Agile
Software Development. Examples of these aspects include infrastructure, operations, data,
security and networks.

Figure 6 shows that successful teams (participants rating their agile development at some degree of
success) have a significantly higher adoption rate for these practices than unsuccessful teams
(participants rating their agile development as unsuccessful or neither unsuccessful nor successful).
https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 12/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

The survey data also reveals that the most successful teams utilize these practices to enable the
delivery of application updates in three weeks or less.

Figure 6. Adoption of Agile Technical Practices in 2019 Survey

Adoption of technical practices correlates strongly with success. As Figure 1 shows, high technical
practice adoption is the only success factor present for each successful group.

Further segmentation of the respondents by agile success revealed that the most successful group,
not surprisingly, had the highest (on average) adoption of technical practices. The other two
successful groups were able to overcome the challenges of low commitment or low duration by
having high (on average) adoption rates for key technical practices.

Therefore, you should focus on test-first development practices (BDD, TDD and refactoring) and
continuous integration. At the same time, you should develop the skills necessary to successfully
implement AAT and DevOps.

Trends for Adoption of Agile Technical Practices

Gartner clients are always interested in what others are doing so that they can understand where
they stand in relation to other companies. Figure 7 clearly illustrates that the adoption of technical
practices has increased, significantly in some cases, over the five years of the survey.

Adopting agile and these technical practices is not the goal Instead you
https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 13/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do
Adopting agile and these technical practices is not the goal. Instead, you
should be constantly asking what more you can do to better satisfy your
customers by continuously delivering valuable software.

Figure 7. Trends in Agile Technical Practice Adoption for Successful

Organizations

Continuous Attention to Technical Excellence and Good Design Enhances Agility

In a meeting between Gartner and the CIO of a large e-commerce company, the CIO stated that the
company needed help with its agile adoption. He went on to explain that the development team had
adopted Scrum three years ago and things weren’t getting any better. In fact, 40% to 50% of
development time was spent correcting defects. Further discussion revealed that the team had simply
time boxed its existing waterfall practices. It was not doing any of the following:

■ CI

■ Unit testing

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 14/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

■ AAT

Developers were maintaining long-lived feature branches and only integrating code at the end of each
three-week sprint. The only good thing that came from adopting Scrum was that they could find and
address problems every three weeks.

The client has since adopted CI and TDD and is working on test automation, which has led to
significantly better results.

Deployment Frequency
The ability to frequently release software is crucial. Thus, we commonly ask clients and conference
attendees the following question: “How long would it take to get a one-line code change into
production?” Figure 8 includes a sample of the answers from the 2017 qualitative survey, provided by
participants who view agile to be a success.

Figure 8. How Long Would It Take to Get a One-Line Code Change Into
Production?

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 15/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

While delivery timing for new features is a business decision, not a technical one, you must also
consider delivery of fixes for high-priority defects. With that in mind, consider the time it takes your
team to release any application update. If your answer is more than a week, investigate to determine
what constraints are preventing more frequent releases. Then, identify and implement new — or
change existing — processes and practices to remove those constraints.

For more information about specific technical practices, see the following documents:

■ “Solution Path for Achieving Continuous Delivery With Agile and DevOps”

■ “A Guidance Framework for Continuous Integration: The Continuous Delivery ‘Heartbeat’”

■ “Building Continuous Delivery Confidence With Test-Driven Development”

■ “Increase Collaboration and Drive Agility With Behavior-Driven Development”

■ “Implement Agile Database Development to Achieve Continuous Delivery”

■ “Solution Path for Testing Software Applications”

■ “Extending Agile With DevOps to Enable Continuous Delivery”

Commitment to Agile Development

As stated earlier in this document, the survey data provides insight for two kinds of organizational
commitment to agile. The first is the overall use of agile by the organization (some versus most/all)
— i.e., how much development was being done using agile methods at the time of the survey. For
example, organizations new to agile development will just be starting to use it — piloting agile in
specific projects or initially rolling out agile for product development. The second kind of
commitment to agile, which will be discussed in more detail, is the adoption of an EAF.

Commitment Fosters an Agile Culture

Committed organizations are more likely to provide the necessary time and support structure for
teams to learn how to be agile. Committed organizations support a continuous learning culture that
enables agile teams to gain the knowledge and experience necessary for sustained success (see
Figure 9). Pair programming, communities of practice, book clubs, innovation sprints and hackathons
all help to develop proficiency with agile processes and technical skills.

In low-commitment organizations, a lack of success, be it real or perceived, causes support for agile
to waver. This can initiate a downward spiral that negatively impacts both experience and technical
practice adoption. If you look back to Figure 1, commitment to the use of agile for development is a
very strong indicator of success, but it is not a guarantee. Although further research is needed, the
data indicates that adopting key technical practices — namely TDD, refactoring, CI and AAT —
enables teams to be successful despite low commitment. Unfortunately, it is much more difficult for
https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 16/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

agile teams to develop these technical skills in an organization where continuous learning about how
to be agile is not viewed as a priority.

Figure 9. Success With Agile Development Increases With

Commitment

Challenges to Establishing an Agile Culture

To assess the effect of commitment on culture, we asked survey participants the following two
questions:

■ “What are the top three challenges or obstacles your organization has faced in adopting agile
development?”

■ “Considering where you are currently in your agile adoption, what are the top challenges your
organization needs to overcome to make agile development more successful?”

Figure 10 shows the top three responses to these questions.

Figure 10. Top Challenges to Success With Agile

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 17/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

Challenges for Agile Adoption

The biggest factor for success (and the most difficult to achieve) is establishing a new agile culture.
Traditional development practices put development professionals into little boxes, where they need
only be worried about their specific piece of the application development life cycle.

“Organizations must understand that truly traversing from waterfall to agile

isn’t just about choosing a method. Truly moving to an agile style of
development requires a significant shift in culture. In the waterfall method,
work was parceled out as tasks to individuals. A project manager was
responsible for assigning resources, and for planning and tracking the work
the individuals were assigned to. This manager was responsible for the
successful completion of the project, and the team members were only
responsible for the successful completion of their assigned tasks. The
project manager essentially was held accountable for the completion, and
held each of the assigned resources accountable for their work.” 2

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 18/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

Agile requires all the members of the team to expand beyond their traditional roles and gain the
knowledge and skills that will enable the team to be successful. This change also requires the
technical professional to engage with business stakeholders and customers, which was traditionally
the role of the analyst.

There Are No Traditional Roles in a Scrum Team

A Scrum team consisting of four developers, one tester, a Scrum Master and a product owner was
having a problem. The developers were able to complete the development of new user stories, but they
were not able to deliver them because the tester was overloaded. The team asked, “What should we
do?”

This problem was caused by the development team continuing to maintain the traditional role silos.
Scrum, by definition, does not maintain such silos because they constrain agility. In Scrum, everyone on
the team is accountable for delivery and responsible for quality. The team needed to agree on a new
way of working.

The team agreed that, before development commenced on a new user story, the developer would check
to see if the backlog of user stories waiting to be tested was growing too large. If the backlog of user
stories waiting to be validated was too large, then the developer would pick a user story and test it.

An Alternative Option

If developers won’t test, then the team doesn’t need four developers. The team could leverage Kanban,
where the team will need just enough developers to keep stories flowing through test to completion.

Work in progress (WIP) is a waste, because stories that are not completed have no value to the
customer. The goal is to incrementally deliver completed stories so that a working version of the
product is always available.

Challenges to Making Agile Development More Successful

Figure 10 also illustrated the top three answers to the following question: “Considering where you are
currently in your agile adoption, what are the top three challenges your organization needs to
overcome to make agile development more successful?” Over the previous years of our survey, the
top three answers were consistent. However, in 2019, we saw a change at the No. 3 position, as
“working in collaboration with end users” dropped to No. 6 on the list. The top three challenges in
2019 were:

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 19/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

1. Shifting from a culture of control to one based on trust: Organizations are struggling to empower
their agile teams to work in a way that enables these teams to be fully accountable and self-
sufficient. Success with agile requires that the command-and-control style of management
change to either the servant-leader or leader-leader (even better) style of management. Within the
agile team, there are no defined leaders, such as technical lead or architect. For the team to be
accountable and self-sufficient, everyone needs to have leadership skills.

2. Shifting from on-time/on-budget metrics to customer satisfaction (CSAT) metrics: The

traditional methods of measuring success no longer apply. Achieving milestones on a Gantt chart
is meaningless. Metrics must change to enable teams to measure the real value of what is being
delivered to customers and stakeholders. Collaborate with customers and stakeholders to ensure
that metrics are used as a means for continuously improving. “When teams don’t view metrics in
context, they can’t reliably ascertain if a change has been good or bad for the organization. To
avoid this pitfall, ensure that you understand the different measurements and how they intersect
with other data. Grouping and overlay techniques help you to understand data when different
measurements give you subtly different results.” 3

3. Shifting the focus (i.e., doing things right, not fast): “Continuous attention to technical excellence
and good design enhances agility.” 4 In other words, if you build it right the first time, you will
spend less time fixing it later. By building in quality, you enable the team to spend more time
delivering the features that your customers desire, thus reducing waste and increasing agility. It
takes time and effort to build in quality, but the investment in both customer collaboration and
automation of development, testing and infrastructure pays huge dividends over time.

Building in Quality
Seventeen years ago, a Gartner client implemented a big-bang adoption of agile for two major
programs. The coaches brought in to train the newly formed agile teams were all experienced in XP. The
agile teams were taught from the start to do TDD, CI and AAT using the tools available at the time (e.g.,
CruiseControl and FitNesse).

At the time, leadership was skeptical about having developers spend their time automating tests.
Compared with how those teams were working prior to the transformation, it certainly was a lot of extra
work for them to create all of the tests in addition to the application code. However, over the life of the
program, this investment in automation has provided significant benefits:

■ Those tests have been executing nightly (at a minimum) for 17 years to ensure that the system is
always in working order. Automated tests are executable specifications and also serve as excellent
system documentation. If the tests are failing, either your system is out of spec or the specs need to
be updated.

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 20/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

■ Those tests have continuously informed the developers working on that program, even though very
few of the original developers remain.

Although the initial costs to the program were high, the cost per execution, when averaged over the life
of the program, has diminished to almost nothing. Compare that to what it would have cost to have
people manually repeat regression tests each and every time the products were released.

For more guidance on actions you can take to change your development culture, see the following
documents:

■ “Become an Agile Superhero: Eight Attributes for Success”

■ “Becoming a Better Scrum Master”

■ “How to Build Successful Communities of Practice for Knowledge Management”

■ “Create Awesome Software Using Agile Practices”

■ “10 Ways Your Agile Adoption Will Fail”

EAFs Require Commitment

The percentage of agile use by an organization is just one way to look at an organization’s
commitment. Another measure of organizational commitment to agile development is indicated by
the adoption of an EAF, such as SAFe, DAD, LeSS or Nexus (Scaled Professional Scrum).

EAF Adoption

Participants were asked to identify the specific EAFs that they were using, including SAFe, DAD, LeSS,
and — even though they are not EAFs — Scrum of Scrums and the Spotify Model. Figure 11 shows
that SAFe is the most broadly considered and adopted EAF among the 2019 survey participants. As
revealed in the figure, 36% of the participants have considered adoption of SAFe, while 26% have
already adopted the framework.

In our 2019 survey, we found that 63% of participants had already adopted at least one EAF, up from
34% in 2018 (see Figure 11). Of those participants who had adopted at least one EAF, 67% reported
success with their overall agile adoption.

In 2019, a new survey question was added that asked participants whether their organization had
adopted an EAF that was later abandoned. For 2019, we had only a 1% overall abandonment rate.
However, as the EAF market continues to grow and evolve, we will continue monitoring it to see what
is and is not working for organizations.

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 21/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

Figure 11. 2019 Results for Enterprise Agile Framework Adoption

The 2019 results, along with client inquiries, help to confirm that there is much confusion about
enterprise agile and the various frameworks and methods. For more information on enterprise agile
frameworks, see the following documents:

■ “Market Guide for Enterprise Agile Frameworks”

■ “Implementing Enterprise Agile Using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)”

■ “Use Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) to Increase Agility”

■ “Adopting the Spotify Model for Better Enterprise Agile Scaling”

EAF Impact on Success

Participants in organizations that have adopted at least one EAF report significantly greater success
with agile adoption — regardless of their years of agile use. On average, 67% of EAF adopters
reported some level of success with agile.

The surprising finding in our data was evidence that adoption of an EAF could result in success, even
for low-duration teams. Despite this finding, we still recommend implementing agile at the team level
first. Teams need the opportunity to gain the essential experience necessary to successfully scale
agile with an EAF.

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 22/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

Prior experience with agile is critical because all EAFs have a shared heritage in Scrum, Kanban and
XP, with a few, such as SAFe and DAD, explicitly incorporating DevOps. Lean principles and system-
based thinking underlie the scaling mechanisms, and all such frameworks promote flattened
management structures with autonomous product- or feature-aligned teams supported by
communities of practice.

EAF adoption is very disruptive to the entire organization. Successful adoption requires the entire
organization to commit to change. When the entire organization is learning to work together in
pursuit of a common goal, agile teams will have the time and support needed to change the culture,
learn new practices and skills, and leverage new tools.

The survey results don’t provide the data necessary to assess changes to culture, but they do provide
some very interesting insight on how adoption impacts practices, skills and tooling. Figure 12 shows
that EAF adopters:

■ Adopt technical practices at rates that are on par with, or even above, the survey average (see
Figure 6)

■ Have significantly higher implementation rates for continuous integration, automated acceptance
testing and DevOps (as compared with Figure 6), which are critical practices that enable three to
12 agile teams to effectively work together to deliver a quality product

Figure 12. EAF Adopters Successful With Agile Have High Technical
Practice Adoption

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 23/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

The Scrum framework only provides guidance for a single cross-functional product development
team to deliver a single application. The Scrum Guide provides no guidance for the coordination of
multiple teams working together on a single application. This is what EAFs provide. Each enterprise
framework provides specific guidance designed to address the challenges of scaling agile from a
single team to multiple teams developing that product. Unfortunately, too many adopters of EAFs fail
to make the organizational changes that are necessary for culture changes to take hold. Choosing to
adopt an enterprise agile framework does not instantly make your organization agile. Enterprise agile
culture has to be earned — you can’t simply buy it.

“We used to do SAFe, but now we do Scrum.” 5

As noted in “Implementing Enterprise Agile Using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe),” the quote
above had been a common mantra among Gartner event attendees. In such cases, SAFe didn’t fail
these organizations. Rather, the organizations failed to understand agile and when to implement
SAFe. The lack of knowledge and understanding of agile by these organizations caused them to
incorrectly apply agile — resulting in a failure to achieve organizational goals. Scrum and XP
practices are at the core of every EAF. Failure to understand and apply these methods and practices
at the team level only increases the difficulty of successfully implementing any EAF.

Although based on a small sample size, Figure 12 shows that EAF adopters who are unsuccessful
with agile have significantly lower technical practice adoption rates than the survey average (shown
in Figure 6). This has been true for each of the five years of our survey.

Recommendations
■ Establish a metrics program: Baselining the current software development process is essential to
measuring the success or failure of any change. Defect rates are the most commonly accepted
metric. However, defect rates are only one measure of product stability. To ensure that you obtain
the data necessary for measuring and monitoring the new process, you will need to consider all
aspects of the development process, such as requirement volatility, defects, customer lead time
and application performance. See “Improve Scrum Development With Effective Use of Agile
Metrics” and “Choose the Right Metrics to Drive Your Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery
Initiatives.”

■ Adopt technical practices: Lead the effort to adopt agile technical practices, like TDD, refactoring,
CI, AAT and DevOps, to increase your ability to frequently deliver stakeholder value. See the
following Gartner research:
https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 24/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

■ “Solution Path for Achieving Continuous Delivery With Agile and DevOps”

■ “A Guidance Framework for Continuous Integration: The Continuous Delivery ‘Heartbeat’”

■ “Implement Agile Database Development to Support Your Continuous Delivery Initiative”

■ “Building Continuous Delivery Confidence With Test-Driven Development”

■ “Increase Collaboration and Drive Agility With Behavior-Driven Development”

■ “Extending Agile With DevOps to Enable Continuous Delivery”

■ “Solution Path for Testing Software Applications”

■ Implement continuous learning practices: Implement practices such as pair programming,

communities of practice, book clubs and hackathons to develop proficiency with agile processes
and technical skills. Don’t just rely on your company to provide you with everything you might need.
For example, join your local agile user groups, attend a code camp or seek external training. Agile
requires continuous development of your capabilities to better support the goals of the team and
the organization.

■ Don’t implement an enterprise-level agile framework, if you haven’t done agile before. Work with
management to identify opportunities to build competence by delivering individual agile projects
at the team level.

■ “Market Guide for Enterprise Agile Frameworks”

■ “Implementing Enterprise Agile Using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)”

■ “Use Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) to Increase Agility”

■ “Adopting the Spotify Model for Better Enterprise Agile Scaling”

Conclusion
The data from the five years of Gartner’s Agile in the Enterprise Survey provides a window into what
agile teams and organizations are doing to achieve success by:

1. Accelerating product delivery

2. Improving alignment between IT and business

3. Better managing changing priorities

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 25/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

The most important thing technical professionals can do to help their teams achieve those goals is
to adopt the agile technical practices shown in Figure 13. The color density map shows that survey
participants in committed organizations are on par with the majority of participants reporting
success with agile development. It also shows quite clearly that those who have been unsuccessful
with agile development are lagging far behind the successful teams with regard to adoption of
technical practices.

Figure 13. Color Density Map of Key Technical Practices for Success

Over the course of the five years of the survey, our analysis has shown that the most successful
teams have adopted the following practices:

■ TDD

■ Refactoring

■ CI

■ AAT

■ DevOps

Frequent delivery of business-critical applications with low defect counts leads to successful
business outcomes, thus increasing trust and confidence. Increasing trust and confidence helps
grow organizational commitment, which in turn provides the support necessary for teams to gain
more experience.
https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 26/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

Evidence
1
“The Scrum Guide,” Scrum Guides.

2
“The Transition to Agile Methods Requires a Culture Shift From ‘Me’ to ‘We.’”

3
“Choose the Right Metrics to Drive Your Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery Initiatives.”

4
“Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto,” AgileManifesto.org.

5
“Implementing Enterprise Agile Using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).”

Note 1
The Gartner Agile in the Enterprise Surveys
Click on the video report link to view a video summary of findings spanning the five years of the
survey. To read each of the individual reports, navigate to the summary reports page.

Gartner Agile in the Enterprise Quantitative Surveys

■ The 2019 Gartner Agile in the Enterprise Quantitative Survey was conducted via an online survey
from 3 June through 25 June 2019, with 130 members of the Gartner Research Circle — a Gartner-
managed panel composed of IT and IT-business professionals. The survey was developed
collaboratively by a team of Gartner analysts and was reviewed, tested and administered by
Gartner’s Research Data and Analytics team. The results of this study are representative of the
respondent base and not necessarily the market as a whole.

■ The 2018 Gartner Agile in the Enterprise Quantitative Survey was conducted via an online survey
in June 2018 among Gartner Research Circle members. In total, 200 members participated.

■ The 2017 Gartner Agile in the Enterprise Quantitative Survey was conducted via an online survey
in September 2017, among Gartner Research Circle members. In total, 185 members participated.

■ The 2016 Gartner Agile in the Enterprise Quantitative Survey was conducted in October 2016,
among Gartner Research Circle members. In total, 176 members participated.

■ The 2015 Gartner Agile in the Enterprise Quantitative Survey was conducted in October 2015,
among Gartner Research Circle members. In total, 167 members participated.

2017 Gartner Agile in the Enterprise Qualitative Survey

■ The 2017 Gartner Agile in the Enterprise Qualitative Survey was conducted via an online survey in
June 2017, among members of the Gartner Research Circle — a Gartner-managed panel
composed of IT and IT-business leaders. We spoke to a total of 11 Research Circle panelists who
work in a range of industries in different regions and use agile in varying degrees. Panelists
https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 27/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

participated in 60-minute online focus groups with four to six other Research Circle panelists,
where they were asked to share their thoughts and experiences on agile in the enterprise.

Document Revision History

Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do - 9 April 2018

Recommended by the Authors

Solution Path for Achieving Continuous Delivery With Agile and DevOps
Solution Path for Testing Software Applications

Create Awesome Software Using Agile Practices

Choose the Right Metrics to Drive Your Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery Initiatives
Improve Scrum Development With Effective Use of Agile Metrics
Become an Agile Superhero: 8 Attributes for Success
Becoming a Better Scrum Master
10 Ways Your Agile Adoption Will Fail

Recommended For You

Design IoT Stream Analytics From Edge to Platform

Guidance for Privileged Access Management

Assessing Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for Cloud-Native Application Delivery on
Kubernetes
Gartner Peer Insights ‘Lessons Learned’: Implementing Content Collaboration Tools
Comparing Cloud Operations Approaches

Supporting Initiatives
Application Development for Technical Professionals

Follow

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 28/29
3/2/22, 9:40 AM Adopting Agile? Do What Successful Agile Teams Do

© 2022 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its
affiliates. This publication may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without Gartner's prior written
permission. It consists of the opinions of Gartner's research organization, which should not be construed as
statements of fact. While the information contained in this publication has been obtained from sources believed to
be reliable, Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information.
Although Gartner research may address legal and financial issues, Gartner does not provide legal or investment
advice and its research should not be construed or used as such. Your access and use of this publication are
governed by Gartner’s Usage Policy. Gartner prides itself on its reputation for independence and objectivity. Its
research is produced independently by its research organization without input or influence from any third party. For
further information, see "Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity."

About Gartner Careers Newsroom Policies Privacy Policy Contact Us Site Index Help

Get the App

© 2022 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

https://www.gartner.com/document/3975269?ref=solrAll&refval=317714598 29/29