The World is Becoming Scrummier

Hot on the heels of my response to Michael O. Church’s tirade against Scrum comes the State of Scrum report: the results of a survey conducted by the Scrum Alliance. There’s bad news for Mr. Church who looked forward to the early death of Agile and Scrum. Use of Scrum is growing exponentially, and developers love it. The world is getting Scrummier in all sorts of ways.

Scrum Alliance

Scrum Alliance is the largest single network of Agilists in the world and now has a membership in excess of 400,000. That’s a jump of 150,000 in just a few months. Nearly 5,000 people responded to their survey from 108 different countries, though three-quarters were from the US and Europe. 77% of those who answered work in software engineering or IT related jobs, although only 29% of the companies they work for are in the IT sector. Other industries prominently represented were Finance, Heathcare, Government, Telecommunications, Insurance and Education. The headlines of the survey results are that Scrum is growing, expanding beyond its use in IT, and is delivering success to customers and to the business. As a parting shot to Michael O. Church who insisted that Scrum was “terrible” for developers, let me point to the answers to the question about whether Scrum has improved the quality of the team’s work life: 87% responded that it had, 10% were unsure, and 4% said no. So, there you have it, Church is the champion of a tiny minority: Mr. four per cent