Recently Brian Marick posted on Scrum + XP practices being the default Agile methodology:
The gorilla of Agile is Scrum + a selection of XP practices
This gels with my experience as well. Most of the Agile practitioners I know are using Scrum with at least some XP practices, and a few are using straight XP. Beyond that I don’t have a lot of exposure to other Agile methodologies.
I do realize that my experience may be badly skewed. I assume the appeal of Scrum is that it’s a pretty lightweight project management methodology which almost assumes you’ll be doing some XP practices. XP is harder to fully adapt since it prescribes things like pair programming that are typically a harder sell.
I have seen some counter evidence from Scott Ambler’s Agile survey:
- Agile MSF 191
- Agile Unified Process (AUP) 216
- Crystal Clear 91
- Dynamic System Development Method (DSDM) 26
- Extreme Programming (XP) 954
- Feature Driven Development (FDD) 502
- Scrum 460
- Other 171
Scrum doesn’t do too badly, but it’s only 18% of the total. XP makes up 37% and FDD is 19%. Maybe Scrum isn’t the default just yet. And things have a long ways to evolve still so we’ll see is Scrum + some XP practices really becomes the most common Agile process over the next few years.