In today’s competitive world of digital business, high quality faster delivery is the only key to success. The Agile approach to software development is highly beneficial to the business in terms of high-quality products, accelerated time to market, and high-quality software delivery achieving company goals and providing customer satisfaction. The 11th annual state of AgileTM survey explains clearly “Agile software development has been growing popular over the last decade”. The reason of increasing demand of Agile approach is the benefits it brings to the businesses.
Benefits of Adopting Agile |
Sr. No. |
Characteristics |
Improvement (in %) |
1 |
Ability to manage to change priorities |
88 |
2 |
Process Visibility |
83 |
3 |
Productivity |
83 |
4 |
Delivery Time to Market |
81 |
5 |
Team Morality |
81 |
6 |
Business/IT Alignment |
76 |
7 |
Software Quality |
75 |
8 |
Project Predictability |
75 |
9 |
Project Risk Reduction |
74 |
10 |
Engineering Discipline |
68 |
11 |
Software Maintainability |
64 |
12 |
Managing Distributed Teams |
61 |
13 |
Project Cost Reduction |
56 |
Source: 11th Annual State of AgileTM Survey by VersionOne
As mentioned above, most of the software product development companies are moving towards the implementation of Agile practices and methods, and usually, go for the Scrum framework. The scrum style of software development under the head of Agile is in very much demand these days. As per 11thAnnual State of Agile report, “68% of the software development companies use Scrum or a Scrum hybrid with Agile”. This, in turn, increases the demand for the Scrum certified professionals and Scrum Masters at most as compared to other certifications, as shown below.
Certifications Offered (by Count) |
Certificate |
2010 |
2011 |
2012 |
2013 |
2014 |
2015 |
2016 |
All Years |
Average |
PSM I |
924 |
3,806 |
7,964 |
11,283 |
14,493 |
14,883 |
26,366 |
79,669 |
11,381 |
Source: Scrum Certifications Data Survey from Scrum.org