Survey on agile and lean usage in finnish software industry
Publicated to:International Symposium On Empirical Software Engineering And Measurement. 139-148 - 2012-01-01 (), DOI: 10.1145/2372251.2372275
Authors: Rodríguez P; Markkula J; Oivo M; Turula K
Affiliations
Abstract
Earlier empirical studies have demonstrated the interest that agile methods have generated in the software industry. Currently, lean approaches are increasingly adopted for complementing agile methods in software processes. With the goal of providing up-today results that can be used by organizations implementing or planning to implement agile and/or lean methods, we have conducted a study on the current stage of agile and lean adoption and usage in the software industry. For this purpose, we conducted an extensive survey among Finnish software practitioners in 2011, using the membership registry of The Finnish Information Processing Association (FIPA) as a sampling frame. 408 responses were collected from 200 software intensive organizations in the study. The survey included questions for identifying the rate of agile and lean usage in software organizations as well as the implementation of specific methods and practices, goals in adopting agile and lean, reasons for not applying these methods and effects of the agile and lean usage. The results of the survey reveal that a majority of respondents' organizational units are using agile and/or lean methods (58%). Furthermore, lean appears as a new player, being used by 24% of respondents, mainly in combination with agile (21%). The reasons and benefits for using agile and lean methods appeared to correspond in most parts to the findings of the earlier research. Generally, the experiences of using agile and lean methods seem to be rather positive, although challenges, such as obtaining management support and limitations for scaling agile in distributed settings, were also identified. Copyright 2012 ACM.
Keywords
Quality index
Bibliometric impact. Analysis of the contribution and dissemination channel
The work has been published in the journal International Symposium On Empirical Software Engineering And Measurement due to its progression and the good impact it has achieved in recent years, according to the agency Scopus (SJR), it has become a reference in its field. In the year of publication of the work, 2012, it was in position , thus managing to position itself as a Q2 (Segundo Cuartil), in the category Software.
From a relative perspective, and based on the normalized impact indicator calculated from World Citations from Scopus Elsevier, it yields a value for the Field-Weighted Citation Impact from the Scopus agency: 4.15, which indicates that, compared to works in the same discipline and in the same year of publication, it ranks as a work cited above average. (source consulted: ESI Nov 14, 2024)
This information is reinforced by other indicators of the same type, which, although dynamic over time and dependent on the set of average global citations at the time of their calculation, consistently position the work at some point among the top 50% most cited in its field:
- Field Citation Ratio (FCR) from Dimensions: 41.47 (source consulted: Dimensions Jul 2025)
Specifically, and according to different indexing agencies, this work has accumulated citations as of 2025-07-05, the following number of citations:
- Scopus: 146
Impact and social visibility
Leadership analysis of institutional authors
This work has been carried out with international collaboration, specifically with researchers from: Finland.
There is a significant leadership presence as some of the institution’s authors appear as the first or last signer, detailed as follows: First Author (RODRIGUEZ GONZALEZ, MARIA PILAR) .
the author responsible for correspondence tasks has been RODRIGUEZ GONZALEZ, MARIA PILAR.