  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%.
