Hybrid Agile Development and Software Quality David Parsons 1 , Ramesh Lal 2 1 Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand d.p.parsons@massey.ac.nz 2 Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand r.lal@massey.ac.nz Abstract Agile methods have been increasingly adopted as a way to increase the speed and flexibility of software development whilst maintaining or improving quality. However, organisations with a heavy investment in, and emphasis on, more traditional software engineering approaches may regard the wholesale adoption of agile methods as being potentially risky. As a result, a number of experiments in hybrid approaches have been made, suggesting that a combination of agile methods and traditional software engineering can be a route to quality software development. Further, that component based software engineering has an important role to play. In this paper we review the key issues in this debate and propose that test related practises are the most significant enabler in providing quality assurance in hybrid systems. 1.0 Introduction Despite the mission criticality of software for most businesses, and decades of experience and technological advancement, significant numbers of software development projects continue to fail, costing substantial amounts of money [1] [2] [3]. These software project failures happen with companies regardless of their size. Table 1 provides a historical perspective on project success and failure from 1980 to 2000. Projects identified as ‘challenged’ are those projects that were completed but were over their budget and time estimates, with fewer features and functions than required. Thus we can see that even though these projects did not fail outright, they were not of sufficient quality.