In today’s competitive world of digital business, high quality faster delivery is the only key to success. The Agile approach to software development is highly beneficial to the business in terms of high-quality products, accelerated time to market, and high-quality software delivery achieving company goals and providing customer satisfaction. The 11^th annual state of Agile^TM survey explains clearly “Agile software development has been growing popular over the last decade”. The reason of increasing demand of Agile approach is the benefits it brings to the businesses.

Benefits of Adopting Agile
Sr. No.	Characteristics	Improvement (in %)
1	Ability to manage to change priorities	88
2	Process Visibility	83
3	Productivity	83
4	Delivery Time to Market	81
5	Team Morality	81
6	Business/IT Alignment	76
7	Software Quality	75
8	Project Predictability	75
9	Project Risk Reduction	74
10	Engineering Discipline	68
11	Software Maintainability	64
12	Managing Distributed Teams	61
13	Project Cost Reduction	56

Source: 11^th Annual State of Agile^TM Survey by VersionOne

As mentioned above, most of the software product development companies are moving towards the implementation of Agile practices and methods, and usually, go for the Scrum framework. The scrum style of software development under the head of Agile is in very much demand these days. As per 11^thAnnual State of Agile report, “68% of the software development companies use Scrum or a Scrum hybrid with Agile”. This, in turn, increases the demand for the Scrum certified professionals and Scrum Masters at most as compared to other certifications, as shown below.

Certifications Offered (by Count)
Certificate	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	All Years	Average
PSM I	924	3,806	7,964	11,283	14,493	14,883	26,366	79,669	11,381

Source: Scrum Certifications Data Survey from Scrum.org