Agile ROI

Via Maruis Marais: Thoughtworks (one of the gracious sponsors of CitCon) commissioned Forrester Research to study the return on investment of their Agile practices. They've published their results here. The results are very encouraging. For example:

Client: Four Fortune 500 Companies

Results:

• Improved time to benefit by 69%
• Reduced cost by 57%
• Reduced effort by 62%
• Reduced critical defects by nearly 80%
• Reduced overall defects by more than 60%

Participants in the study indicated they realized or expected to realize 29 to 66 percent risk-adjusted return on investment over three years using ThoughtWorks' agile development approach.

This is not surprising to those of us who've already had a taste of the Agile kool-aide, but hard numbers may help swing some skeptics.

These numbers show why we should do Agile. More value per unit investment. Moreover, the value is returned earlier in the development cycle.