I've been talking to a number of people around the GIS industry lately, and when I bring up our use of Agile methods and Scrum, most people have had a pretty blank look on their faces. Once I explain the idea and the methodology most seem genuinely interested, and the most common response is - "that makes sense".

Throw in the that that since adopting Scrum, our team has become more productive and focused that ever, and this seems to be a very common outcome. So I'm surprised that more people are not familiar with agile. 

In an attempt to see if anyone else in GIS is talking about agile and/or Scrum, I did some searching, and found this...

Apparently these guys have had 6 conferences on "AGILE" and GIS. Unfortunately this has nothing to do with the wider "Agile" concepts as applied to software development (see the Agile Manifesto for more on this).

Anyhow, I continued searching. With the exception of my occasional post, Chris Spagnuolo's blog, and some job postings from our company which note the use of Agile methodologies, I found only a few other things:

1. A post on the MapButcher blog re: Managing GIS Projects which talks about Scrum
2. A post on Human-Debugger (Shani Raba)'s blog about some Scrum experiences
3. Paolo Corti has some posts on Test Driven Development (TDD), but they are related to his excellent series on MonoRail and the Castle Project.
4. A description of an agile methodology used by Dynamic Ventures (off-shoring group) for all their project - including GIS.
5. Infinity Solutions (also an off-shoring shop) also came up, but I could not actually find anything GIS related on their site.

There may be more, but was 5 pages into the search results and things were getting pretty far off base.

Development Trends outside of GIS

This lack of discussion about GIS and Agile is very interesting because in the broader software industry we are seeing a much different story. Anecdotally, I can say that the Certified Scrum Master classes we've looked into for other team members have been pretty full. The Scrum classes I've attended have been full and had a wide range of people in them - from senior "PMI" project managers to video game designers. We hear that there are many teams in Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google which have adopted scrum and other agile processes with great success. But lets look for some numbers to back some of this up...

Last year Scott Ambler did a survey about agile adoption (here's Scott's PowerPoint with all the data and some charts etc). He used the Dr Dobbs Journal (a long-running software development magazine) mailing list, and got 4232 responses.

Two questions were particularly interesting:

Have you adopted any agile techniques? - 65% Yes

Have you adopted an agile methodology? 41% Yes

So - assuming that this is a somewhat representative sample, 65% of the software industry have adopted some agile techniques and 40% have adopted an agile methodology. 

So why are we not seeing more discussion of agile in the geospatial industry? Is the GIS industry still caught in the waterfall? Thoughts?