Survey of Agile Tool Usage and Needs

Abstract

Today, little is known about what tools software companies are using to support their Agile methods and whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied with them. This is due to lack of objective surveys on the subject. The surveys that have been conducted so far are of a subjective nature and have mostly been performed by tool vendors. They are very limited in number and focus mainly on company structure and adherence to a specific Agile method rather than on tool usage and needs. For this reason, many companies have difficulties to choose appropriate tools to support their Agile process. One such company is the Swedish telecommunications giant Ericsson. To account for this lack of data, Ericsson commissioned us to conduct an independent survey focusing on the tool usage and needs as experienced by the Agile software community today. In this paper, we report on the results of our survey. The survey covers 121 responses from 120 different companies coming from 35 different countries. Our results show that the most satisfactory tool aspect is ease of use, whereas the least satisfactory one is lack of integration with other systems. Finally, our results provide a list of features that are most desired by the software companies today.