During the recent TechED Australia event on the Gold Coast, we ran a 'process survey' at our booth – with the lure of an Xbox 360 as a giveaway.  Our goal with the survey was to try and understand more about ‘process’ within the Australian software development community.

 

After weeding out some multiple entries, the remaining 568 entries provided us with some interesting insights ...

 

Challenges faced on Software Projects:

 

We asked the respondents to select from the following list the top 3 challenges their organisation faced on software projects:

  • Delayed Delivery
  • Cost overruns
  • Poor Architecture
  • Poor Communication
  • Engagement with Users
  • Lack of Testing
  • Poor Requirements
  • Unclear/Imprecise Business Objectives
  • Poor Project Management
  • Lack of Executive Support
  • Bad Choice of Technology
  • Lack of a Formal Methodology

Graph #1 shows the raw votes from the respondents:

 

(Note some respondents voted for more than 3 challenges - and some didn't vote at all):

 

 

Graph #2 shows the raw data from Graph #1 broken down into the votes for each challenge as a percentage of the total number of votes:

 

 

What is more interesting than these 'raw scores' is, as per Graph #3 the percentage of voters (respondents) that voted for each of the challenges (thanks for the suggestion Ian!):

 

 

The results were not surprising:

  • Most organisations struggle to deliver software projects on time
  • Understanding what the business really wants - poor requirements and unclear of imprecise business objectives - continues to be one of the leading challenges for development teams
  • choosing the right technology is rarely the problem.

These results align reasonably well with what we encounter in our consulting business and are routinely reflected in many other, more rigorous research studies.

 

Looking deeper into these results with Graph #4 reveals that the same perceptions are held consistently across different sizes of organisation:

 

 

Graph #5 shows the same data as Graph #4 but this time as a percentage of voters (respondents) that voted for each of the challenges - categorised by the size of their organisaiton:

 

 

Graphs #4 & #5 appear to indicate that, based on organisation size, the olnly notable difference in the challenges faced is around testing – adequate testing appears to be more of a challenge for those in larger organisations.

 

However, when taking into account the Project Size, the responses show a bit more variation as per Graph #6 and Graph #7:

 

 

Graph #7 shows the same data as Graph #6, but this time as a percentage of voters (respondents) that voted for each of the challenges - categorised by the size of their project team size:

 

 

Graphs #6 & #7 indicate that for those involved with larger project team sizes (>25 staff), delayed delivery, cost overruns and architecture are much more of a perceived challenge.

 

Interestingly, for these larger project teams, requirements, communication, testing, project management and a formal methodology are perceived to be less of a challenge in contrast to smaller team sizes – possibly indicating a pro-active or organisational focus on these known high risk factors.

 

Adoption of Team Foundation Server

 

As Process MeNtOR TeamGuide leverages the process capabilities of Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) we were interested to know more about the adoption of TFS in the Australian market.  Graph #8 shows that TFS has been adopted by about 1 in 4 respondents – so far...

 

 

In terms of project teams using TFS, Graph #9 shows that the bulk of the usage at the moment is on projects with 10 people or less:

 

 

Organisations that are using TFS are predominantly the larger organisations as shown in Graph #10:

 

 

Within the community of TFS users, Graph #11 shows that there is a positive attitude and awareness of the importance of process for software development – obviously a good sign for us given our product offering involves a software process!

 

 

Although process is regarded as important, Graphs #12 & 13 illustrates the diversity of process use/adoption within the TFS community and the large prevalence of ‘in-house’ development methodologies.

 

 

 

Drilling into this data a little further, Graph #14 reveals that when choosing a process (i.e. when a non-in-house process is in use) larger team sizes favour the commercially available processes (Process MeNtOR, and RUP) over the ‘open source’ processes such as MSF for Agile, SCRUM and XP:

 

 

What was also pleasing to see was the diversity of roles represented by our survey respondents within the organisations using TFS - as shown in Graph #15: 

 

 

Survey Insights:

 

For us, these survey results are encouraging:

  • We understand the major challenges faced by software delivery projects – and our methodology effectively addresses these challenges.
  • There is a solid base of Team Foundation Server (TFS) usage within the Australian community – that we expect to grow significantly over the next few years.
  • Within the existing TFS community, there is a healthy regard for process.

The challenge for us, which we are actively addressing with our evolving range of products, is encouraging organisations to move beyond ‘in-house’ methodologies and leverage commercially available, best practice methodologies like Process MeNtOR via products like TeamGuide.