Chris Spagnulolo released results of his Agile GIS Survey 2008, the first survey of GIS developers about agile. Of the 347 responents, 32% said their organizations use agile practices. This compares to 69% who said they use agile in a separate survey of the general developer population by Scott Ambler done a year ago.

Chris offers that after GIS developers start using agile practices, they use them in the same way as what her calls “mainstream” developers. In the results, something pops out at me. More than half of the respondents said they did not know when their organizations would adapt agile practices and more than 14% said they think their organizations would never go agile. Along with some other questions along these lines, it seems that GIS developers are likely to remain less agile than the rest of the development world.

In Chris’ whitepaper analyzing the results, he postulates that GIS is certainly lagging the rest of the market in terms of agile adoptation, and it is really not that far behind. The reasons for the difference are not clear from the survey results. Perhaps GIS developers are more resistent to change. Maybe management and customers don’t see the value. This is an open question.

Could it be that developing GIS applications is somehow different in a way that makes it agile-unfriendly? Or maybe organizations that are now have the main GIS developement activities tend to be conservative and thus less likely to embrace agile - governments, utilities, and large contractors serving them. I didn’t see anything in the survey results indicating the industry the respondents work in.

This survey is a great first step in better understanding of the GIS developer community. As Chris suggests, future surveys and analysis will help us better understand.