Plan-Driven Approaches Are Alive and Kicking in Agile Global Software Development

Background: Agile methods are no longer restricted to small projects and co-located teams. The last decade has seen the spread of agile into large scale, distributed and regulated domains. Many case studies show successful agile adoption in GSD, however, taken as a whole, it remains unclear how widespread this trend is, and what form the agile adoption takes in a global software development (GSD) setting. Aims: Our objective is to gain a deeper understanding of how organisations adopt agile development methods in distributed settings. Specifically we aim to plot the current development process landscape in GSD. Method: We analyse industrial survey data from 33 different countries collected as part of the HELENA project that explored the wider use of hybrid development approaches in software development. We extract and analyse the results of 263 surveys completed by participants involved in globally distributed projects. Results: In our sample, 72% of globally distributed projects implement a mix of both agile and traditional approaches (termed `hybrid'). 25% of GSD projects are predominantly agile, with only very few (2%) opting for traditional approaches. GSD projects that used only agile methods tended to be very large. Conclusions: Globally Distributed Software Development (and project size) is not a barrier to adopting agile practices. Yet, to facilitate project coordination and general project management, many adopt traditional approaches, resulting in a hybrid approach that follows defined rules.