A survey conducted by Serena Software has revealed that whilst projects using Agile are working well, they could be much better and some of the biggest challenges include upsteam and downstream communication.

The Agile 2012 survey, whose results were announced at the Agile2012 conference shows that development teams have coalesced on key agile practices, but lack of communication with customers, operations and other development teams is the biggest threat to agile success.

Some of the key findings of the Serena survey include customer satisfaction, agile adoption, and continuous delivery cycle in the organization. Customer satisfaction showed that 52% of customers were happy with Agile projects, while 15% were unhappy. It also showed that Agile adoption is still not spreading as widely throughout the enterprise as many would have hoped with 49% of respondents saying that all or most of their organization is doing Agile (the other 51% are doing some or little Agile). What came out as surprise that it is the communication that’s halting the agile implementation. Prioritizing customer demand and working with non-Agile teams are the biggest challenges reported by both management and development staff, followed by communicating with customers and integrating code with other teams. Around 50% of them indicate that understanding and prioritizing customer demand needed the most improvement. But on the flip side, developers feel that sprints needed to be tested more thoroughly. So, somehow the view points between developers and the management teams are clashing.

Taking into concern the results, Serena Software also gives some advice to the enterprises who have implemented or are trying to implement Agile into their processes. As not everyone is agile, they’ll have to think globally and act agile. Taking favor of developers, they suggest that the codes should be effectively tested, deployed, supported and improved, in order to become a successful agile team. Finally, don’t forget the mainframe as it powers many of today’s most critical applications.