Software Project Success

The data at the right shows what the Standish Group has found in their surveys of software project outcomes. As you can see, software project success rates are abysmal. Most people feel the success rate is increasing slightly each year (about 1.7%) which means sometime in the year 2014 we may reach 50% of sofwtare projects completing successfully!

In addition, the data shows smaller projects are much more successful than large projects. In fact, projects with a budget of $750k or less are 23 times more likely to complete successfully! Is it any surprise that the Standish Group recommends use of an agile process as one of the top 10 project success factors? In the same interview, Jim Johnson, CEO of the Standish Group says he is a "big believer in Agile." If nothing else, this has to make you do some serious thinking about software development methods.

What about agile projects?

As mentioned above, the Standish Group lists agile process as #5 on their top 10 project success factors. In addition, the December 2007 issue of Dr. Dobbs Journal posted the result of their survey of project outcomes. In that survey agile projects succeeded 72% of the time compared to a 63% success rate for traditional projects. These numbers are much higher than the numbers from the Standish Group. Many sources have mentioned various reasons for the discrepenacy. Our belief is the Dr. Dobbs survey used a much smaller data set and a demographic that was likely to be at the higher end of the success spectrum (readers of Dr. Dobbs Journal).

The bottom line as far as we are concerned is that agile projects are viewed as being more successful than traditional projects. We have seen this time and time again so we aren’t surprised. Agile For All exists because of the discrepency between traditional and agile process success rates!