Cyber Defense eMagazine August 2020 Edition

The 14 th Annual State of Agile Report explores this uptake and the reasons for it, along with wider issues
concerning Agile.
The importance of Agile
The 14 th Annual State of Agile report, based on a survey of more than 1,000 global IT and business
professionals, highlights how Agile adoption improves key capabilities needed to respond to current
business challenges. Around six in ten respondents said Agile has both helped increase speed to market
and improved team productivity.
A follow up survey conducted in mid-May 2020 to learn more about how the COVID-19 pandemic has
affected Agile adoption revealed that 55 percent of respondents said their company plans to increase the
use of Agile in the next 12-24 months. This is a rise of 13 percent over the original survey completed just
five months previously. Additionally, 43 percent of organisations said their momentum for Agile adoption
has increased over the past 90 days, with 15 percent saying the increase is significant.
The main catalyst for organisations to adopt Agile comes from wanting to accelerate delivery of value to
customers as well as being able to quickly respond to changing circumstances. Indeed, our survey found
that the second largest reason for adopting Agile is to enhance the ability to manage changing priorities,
with two-thirds (63 percent) of respondents citing this as a key motivator.
This key advantage has led to Agile being adopted in many areas of the business. Software development
and IT are understandably the most popular at 37 percent and 26 percent. However, increasingly it is
being utilised in operations, marketing, HR and sales. Cybersecurity is no exception as Agile can help
security teams combat continually evolving threats.
The diffusion of Agile principles
The concept of Agile has been around for many years now. It began in the late 2000s with the Scrum
framework, which focuses on teamwork, accountability and iterative releases for the development of
hardware and software. This was expanded throughout the early 2000s through a variety of scaling
frameworks allowing multiple small teams to collaborate effectively on various parts of the product. Today
teams collaborate in a variety of ways beyond the traditional face to face interactions with 71 percent of
companies reporting teams collaborating across multiple geographies.
As companies began to benefit from increased development productivity, they realised their next
bottleneck was actually getting the new product to production. This led to the rise in prominence of
DevOps in the middle of the 2010s ushering in an expansion in Agile practices and culture. To that end
more than 90 percent of respondents are now placing a high value on DevOps and 75 percent of
organisations are actively planning and/or implementing transformation in this area. Organisations going
through their DevOps transformation look to achieve accelerated delivery speed (70 percent), improved
quality (62 percent) and reduced risk (48 percent). In an increasingly digital world, it’s critical to get high
quality, valuable software to consumers as rapidly as possible. It’s clear that organisations are realising
focus in this area is critical for their survival.
As DevOps began to address operational bottlenecks, organisations started to see issues in other areas
and have realised they need to look at the entire end-to-end value stream. Value Stream Management
Cyber Defense eMagazine – August 2020 Edition 81
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