The newest VersionOne 12th Annual State of Agile Report was released on April 9, 2018. Last year I compared the growth of scaling frameworks and methods to each other year over year. (click here to see the report from last year)
This year doesn’t have any big surprises.
- Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) is up 400%
- DA has a CAGR of 3%, showing a pattern of adoption rate that is too slow to catch the market leaders.
- while Nexus remains poignantly stagnant.
- The SAFe® added 4%. I was surprised by this one a bit, actually. I had expected 10-15% growth year over year. 29% is still the leader though. It is good to be in front?
- The SAFe is still up 53% from the 9th Annual report with a CAGR of 5%.
- LeSS is up 67%, but still holds a very small market share behind DAD
- LeSS has a CAGR of 6%, slightly above the SAFe
- LeSS had a head start on the SAFe in 2005-2008, and 2010 but still indicates a very low adoption rate by market share CAGR in the first growth period from 2005 to 2011 when the SAFe was released.
- With such a huge head start, why is LeSS not the market leader?
- RAGE, whatever that is… dropped by 100%
For comparison purposes, here is the growth/shrink from the 10th to 11th Annual reports.
Notes:
- None of the current market leaders registered in the report in 2011 where the topic was “Agile Methods and Practices.” Fast forward to the 12th annual report and the topic is now “Scaling Agile.” I find this quite interesting. Is it a market indictment of disconnected methods and practices that fail to address organizational change in a holistic, meaningful way? It does seem to suggest so. It is also clear that “Scaling Frameworks” are also insufficient as a standalone tool used for organizational change.
- LeSS has the highest CAGR with the SAFe following closely behind.
References:
“VersionOne 11th Annual State of Agile Report.” VersionOne, explore.versionone.com/state-of-agile/versionone-11th-annual-state-of-agile-report.
“VersionOne 12th Annual State of Agile Report.” VersionOne, explore.versionone.com/state-of-agile/versionone-12th-annual-state-of-agile-report.
Data:
| 9th Annual | 10th Annual | Growth/Shrink 10-11 | 11th Annual | |
| SCALED AGILE FRAMEWORK® (SAFE®) | 19 | 23 | 22% | 28 |
| SCRUM / SCRUM OF SCRUMS | 69 | 72 | -63% | 27 |
| INTERNALLY CREATED METHODS | 25 | 17 | -24% | 13 |
| LEAN MANAGEMENT | 18 | 9 | -56% | 4 |
| AGILE PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT (APM) | 9 | 6 | -33% | 4 |
| LARGE-SCALE SCRUM (LESS) | 3 | 4 | -25% | 3 |
| DISCIPLINED AGILE DELIVERY (DAD) | 4 | 1 | 0% | 1 |
| RECIPES FOR AGILE GOVERNANCE IN THE ENTERPRISE (RAGE) | 1 | 1 | 0% | 1 |
| NEXUS | 0 | 0 | 0% | 1 |
| 12th Annual | Growth/Shrink 11-12 | 9th to 12th Annual CAGR |
| 29 | 4% | 5% |
| 19 | -30% | -13% |
| 10 | -23% | -10% |
| 3 | -25% | -18% |
| 3 | -25% | -11% |
| 5 | 67% | 6% |
| 5 | 400% | 3% |
| 0 | -100% | -100% |
| 1 | 0% | 0% |
blogagility.com 
One thought on “VersionOne 12th Annual State of Agile Report – Scaling Methods Growth Comparison”