The Scrum Alliance has published its 2017-18 State of Scrum Report that provide data about Scrum adoption and trends based on a survey of more than 2,000 of its members. This report emphasizes Agile transformation and the need for scaling Scrum. It also shows that people using only Scrum has strongly decreased these past two years.
The State of Scrum 2017-2018 is based on a survey of more than 2,000 members of the Scrum Alliance that have received a certification from this organization. With its easily accessible Scrum master certification, the Scrum Alliance can be considered as the main organization in the Scrum universe.
Even if the data of this survey should be considered with circumspection (I would compare this to surveying only iPhone users to provide a view of the mobile market), this report provides nevertheless some interesting data about the Scrum usage. Another caution is that almost 50% of the respondents are located in the USA, but this might be by itself an interesting data on Scrum adoption if it can be related to the location for certified scrum masters. For instance, even if the USA have a population that is four times larger than Germany, it provides 12 times more answers in this survey.
Here are some interesting data from the report
* Average number of people in a Scrum team: 7.4
* Average length of a Scrum sprint: 2.4 weeks
* Average number of Sprints per Scrum project: 5
* Average duration of a Scrum project: 11.6 weeks
* 78% of respondents are likely to recommend Scrum to colleagues and other professionals
* 55% of projects within the organization are Scrum projects
* 63 percent of Scrum projects were reported successful
There is an interesting part in this report about the usage of Scrum as a “pure” approach or combined with other concepts. The number of respondents using only Scrum decreased from 43% in 2015 to 16% in 2017. On average, the report says that respondents incorporate between three and four methods such as Kanban, Lean or Hybrid simultaneously in their Agile practice.
The report contains also some use cases that provide examples of the usage of Scrum, sometimes in other domains than IT.
The 2017-18 State of Scrum Report can be freely downloaded on https://www.scrumalliance.org/why-scrum/state-of-scrum-report/2018-state-of-scrum