Survey: Top Agile 'Pain Point' Is Capturing Requirements -- ADTmag

Survey: Top Agile 'Pain Point' Is Capturing Requirements

By David Ramel
January 21, 2011

Going Agile shifts the focus of gathering application requirements from detailed specifications to user stories, and that's the biggest obstacle to success, according to a recent survey of companies making the leap.

However, the top reported 'pain point' listed by companies was dependent upon what stage of Agile adoption the respondents were at, according to the survey, which gathered information from nearly 1,000 developers and other business professionals and was published last month by AccuRev, UrbanCode and Rally Software.

So, while capturing requirements was the top overall problem area among all respondents, a lack of automated tests was the No. 1 issue among companies that were at the "mostly/all" level of Agile adoption. The other levels were: no plans, planning, piloting and scaling.

"This study showcases the shift in key Agile pain points as Agile processes are increasingly deployed throughout an organization," according to the survey overview. The "Agile Pain Points and Adoption Trends" survey report can be downloaded from AccuRev's Web site upon user registration.

The report listed the "top five overall Agile paint points" and the respective percentage of respondents listing them as No. 1 as:

Capturing requirements (16%)
Lack of in-house experience (14%)
Lack of automated tests (13%)
People spread across projects (10%)
Support [of] Agile and non-Agile projects (8%)

Other pain points listed in the survey included: audit/governance on an Agile project, lack of automated deployments, Agile with a distributed team and lack of automated build and more.

The survey also gathered information on the level of Agile adoption among organizations, and the results were consistent with other similar studies that indicate the majority of software development efforts are shifting to Agile methodologies. It reported that 68 percent of organizations were implementing Agile at some level. These levels of Agile adoption among respondents were: