This number sounded suspicious to me, so I downloaded the report. What it actually says is that 97% of organizations practice some level of agile, but the percentage of teams using agile is much lower. The most common response (46%) was "Less than 1/2 of our teams are agile", for example.
Saying that "97% of organizations practice agile development methods" makes it sound like it's overwhelmingly dominant, but it's not even possible to tell from these responses if a plurality of the teams who responded to a "State of Agile survey" use it, or what the most common development methodology is.
This is exactly the sort of contextless figure that you'll find torn apart in "How to Lie with Statistics".
> "JavaScript is more popular than ever, and over 69% of developers use JavaScript
Does anyone really believe that StackOverflow surveys gather a representative sample of all developers? This same survey found that 1 in 6 developers target the Raspberry Pi (more than iOS), and 7.5% use assembly language (more than Go, Objective-C, or VB.NET). It's an interesting survey but take it with a grain of salt.
Saying that "97% of organizations practice agile development methods" makes it sound like it's overwhelmingly dominant, but it's not even possible to tell from these responses if a plurality of the teams who responded to a "State of Agile survey" use it, or what the most common development methodology is.
This is exactly the sort of contextless figure that you'll find torn apart in "How to Lie with Statistics".
> "JavaScript is more popular than ever, and over 69% of developers use JavaScript
Does anyone really believe that StackOverflow surveys gather a representative sample of all developers? This same survey found that 1 in 6 developers target the Raspberry Pi (more than iOS), and 7.5% use assembly language (more than Go, Objective-C, or VB.NET). It's an interesting survey but take it with a grain of salt.