Despite all its widespread industry buzz, when the Agile movement was first conceived it was designed as a methodology to aid small, co-located development teams. Overtime, however, we have observed the methodology spread to larger teams and large organizations, with many larger development organizations attempting to roll it out in mass to all of their development groups.
Clearly, however, the allure of Agile within these larger organizations is waning, with our research demonstrating a clear, negative correlation between team and organization size and expected future adoption rates of Agile methodologies. Whereas the higher levels of interactions and feedback cycles can be beneficial in coordinating participation from the potentially large number of stakeholders, it can also be debilitating and cumbersome when scaled to accommodate and address all of their input.
In general, the adoption of Agile methods within the embedded market has lagged that of the enterprise/IT domain. As such, it is no surprise that embedded developers, early in the adoption cycle than their IT counterparts, remain relatively bullish in their anticipated rate of adoption - both across small and medium size organizations. Given the often siloed nature of embedded engineering tasks (and the subsequent ability to facilitate parallelization), it might very well have gained a higher level of success in larger organizations than for IT development. However, since the embedded market IS more nascent in its use of the methodologies we expect that it will still take some time to evaluate its level of success on an even keel with the IT market – especially as more safety-critical development projects begin to experiment with the methodology in greater frequency.
VDC explores these issues and trends among others within its recently published report, Engineering Design Methodologies, Processes & Standards, which is the final volume from VDC’s Software and System Lifecycle Management Service.
Comments