The Project Manager's Guide to Mastering Agile, 2nd Edition

12Hybrid Agile Models

I’VE SEEN MANY ARTICLES THAT POSITION “AGILE” AND “WATERFALL” as two binary and mutually exclusive alternatives with no middle ground between the two. Instead of thinking of what people commonly call “Agile” and “Waterfall” as individual discrete methodologies, it is more accurate to see it as a continuous spectrum of approaches from heavily plan‐driven at one extreme to heavily adaptive at the other extreme.

A hybrid Agile approach is one that blends plan‐driven principles and practices with Agile (adaptive) principles and practices in the right proportions to fit a given situation. Each has their own strengths. Mixing these together in the right way can fit your context better than just narrowly using only one of them.

As an example, some years ago, I was responsible for managing a very large development program for a US Federal Government agency. It had a fixed‐price contract associated with it and a fairly aggressive delivery schedule. However, the customer wanted some level of flexibility in the details associated with defining requirements, so I created an approach for this situation that was very successful that I have called the “Managed Agile Development” process which will be discussed in Chapter 24 of this book. The Managed Agile Development process is an excellent example of a hybrid Agile process that is relatively easy to implement.

It’s important to note that a given hybrid Agile approach might even require a different blend of approaches ...