Hybrid software and system development in practice: waterfall, scrum, and beyond

TLDR

Software and system development faces rapidly changing markets, prompting companies to combine structured methods with agile practices, yet the abundance of approaches leads to ad‑hoc process composition. The study surveys hybrid software development practices to identify which approaches are used, how they are combined, and what contextual factors influence their adoption. The authors conducted a survey of 69 participants to examine the use, combination, and contextual drivers of hybrid software development approaches. The survey of 69 participants revealed that hybrid approaches are common, typically built on a traditional framework with agile practices added, are independent of company size or external triggers, and arise from natural process evolution driven by experience, learning, and pragmatism.

Abstract

Software and system development faces numerous challenges of rapidly changing markets. To address such challenges, companies and projects design and adopt specific development approaches by combining well-structured comprehensive methods and flexible agile practices. Yet, the number of methods and practices is large, and available studies argue that the actual process composition is carried out in a fairly ad-hoc manner. The present paper reports on a survey on hybrid software development approaches. We study which approaches are used in practice, how different approaches are combined, and what contextual factors influence the use and combination of hybrid software development approaches. Our results from 69 study participants show a variety of development approaches used and combined in practice. We show that most combinations follow a pattern in which a traditional process model serves as framework in which several fine-grained (agile) practices are plugged in. We further show that hybrid software development approaches are independent from the company size and external triggers. We conclude that such approaches are the results of a natural process evolution, which is mainly driven by experience, learning, and pragmatism.