Tailoring Hybrid Software Processes in a Medium-size Software Company

Software process definition require some flexibility to take into account different contexts and goals. Agile software development provides this flexibility by including a series of practices that the development team can adjust according to its needs. However, in practice, most companies do not apply a pure agile process but a combination of agile and traditional practices, i.e., hybrid processes. For each project context, a different combination of practices yield varying results for different goals, i.e., productivity, product quality, etc. In previous work, we have proposed DynaTail, a method for guiding the definition of the practices to be included as part of the hybrid software process for particular contexts so that an intended goal is optimized. Although DyanTail has proven to be effective in lab experiments, it is still difficult to assess to what extent it can be applied in industry. This paper presents its application in a medium-size software company to assess its potential adoption. The method was evaluated as useful and each step was understandable. However, some limitations were identified such as the need for guidance and tool support. We also found some non-anticipated valuable applications such as using DynaTail as a basis for negotiating with clients the process to be used by the project.