Agile software development processes appear more effective than traditional approaches, but agile seems to have hit a wall as far as growth, according to an IBM official's keynote presentation Monday afternoon at the SD West conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Citing survey data, Scott Ambler, IBM practice leader for agile development, said a February survey with about 600 respondents found 69 percent were utilizing agile development practices. "The bad news is, this is the exact same number we had last year," Ambler said. This, he said, leads him to speculate that "agile has peaked."

"Maybe there's still some more room for agile adoption, but we don't quite know yet," said Ambler. "The good news is that agile appears to be more effective in practice than traditional approaches. The evidence seems to be growing, at least."

Agile development is marked by its featuring short iterations, usually two weeks, in which parts of a software project are developed. This is counter to the long, drawn-out processes of traditional waterfall methodologies.

Some organizations, however, cannot adopt agile methods, Ambler said. "It's simply because of their own organizational culture." He said. "They have systemic challenges," said Ambler.

An attendee queried about agile development after the presentation backed up this notion.

"It’s a good way to do small projects, at least from my perspective," said Rich Peters, senior software engineering manager at Braxton Technologies. "In our environment, we can't use that technology because we have government requirements about how we do our development. But for internal projects, it would be fine."

Ambler also said research found a disparity in what developers and managers thought was happening with agile; 61 percent of developers thought they were doing agile development while 78 percent of management thought agile development was in use.

Ambler cited issues with agile. "One of the biggest problems right now in the agile community is we've gotten really good at developing siloed systems. That's not useful," he said.

Some challenges to agile development include entrenched processes, enterprise discipline, compliance requirements, team size, and application complexity.

Also at the conference, CodeGear officials said the company would release an upgrade to the company's 3rdRail IDE for the Ruby on Rails Web framework in a week and a half.

Release 1.1 includes support for Ruby on Rails 2.0, offering such capabilities as automatic error identification and support for REST (Representational State Transfer) Web services, said Joe McGlynn, CodeGear director of product management.

Also featured is a fast debugger. "What we did with that, we looked at what was needed for a debugger and decided that this was something that was so core to what a developer needs that it really needed to be [available] for everybody," McGlynn said.

CodeGear has open-sourced the debugger to Eclipse during the past three months.  "We just thought it was such a core piece of what developers needed," McGlynn said.

CodeGear has been releasing updates to 3rdRail every three months since the first release came out in since the first release came out in September. CodeGear 3rdRail costs $399 for a perpetual license plus one year of updates.

CodeGear was broken out of Borland Software as a separate business unit in February 2006 and got its name in November of that year. Still owned by Borland, CodeGear was profitable every quarter last year, McGlynn said.

While Borland and subsequently CodeGear have had to compete with free open-source offerings in the developer tools space, CodeGear officials noted there have always been free tools, such as the Emacs text editor. "Professional developers will pay for something that gives them an advantage," said McGlynn.

When CodeGear was formed, officials had to prove to customers the viability of the company's products. "In the early part of when Borland announced [the formation of the tools unit], there was concern about what is this going to mean to the products," said Dave Intersimone, CodeGear vice president of developer relations and chief evangelist.

"That was something we had to prove to our customers: that we were focused on development," Intersimone said.