Catching up with Method and Process Practice: An Industry-Informed Baseline for Researchers

TL;DR

This paper investigates how companies implement hybrid software development methods in practice, revealing that most adopt combined approaches and that strategic process evolution improves their effectiveness.

Contribution

It provides an industry-informed baseline by analyzing survey data on hybrid method usage and factors influencing process suitability in software development.

Findings

76.8% of companies use hybrid methods

Company size influences process choice

Process evolution strategies improve suitability by up to 5%

Abstract

Software development methods are usually not applied by the book. Companies are under pressure to continuously deploy software products that meet market needs and stakeholders' requests. To implement efficient and effective development processes, companies utilize multiple frameworks, methods and practices, and combine these into hybrid methods. A common combination contains a rich management framework to organize and steer projects complemented with a number of smaller practices providing the development teams with tools to complete their tasks. In this paper, based on 732 data points collected through an international survey, we study the software development process use in practice. Our results show that 76.8% of the companies implement hybrid methods. Company size as well as the strategy in devising and evolving hybrid methods affect the suitability of the chosen process to reach company or project goals. Our findings show that companies that combine planned improvement programs with process evolution can increase their process' suitability by up to 5%.