A Novel Social Network Analysis to Explore Hybrid Software Development Methods and Practices - Insights from the HELENA Dataset

Software development in practice rarely follows a single prescribed methodology. Instead, development teams increasingly combine traditional, agile, and hybrid methods and practices to address contextual constraints and project-specific demands. While prior empirical research has documented the prevalence of such hybridization, limited attention has been paid to the structural relationships through which methods and practices are combined in practice. This study investigates how software development methods and practices coexist and interconnect in real-world settings by applying Social Network Analysis (SNA) to secondary empirical data derived from the HELENA research project conducted in European software organizations. In this network model, methods and practices are represented as nodes, while their observed co-usage relationships are modeled as weighted, undirected edges. The resulting network comprises 36 methods and practices and reveals a densely connected structure indicative of widespread hybridization. Network-level and node-level analyses identify a small set of practices—most notably Continuous Deployment, Unit Testing, and Code Review, alongside Scrum—as structurally central elements that facilitate the integration of diverse development approaches. These findings suggest that contemporary hybrid software development ecosystems are shaped less by isolated methodologies and more by a core set of highly connective practices. By introducing a novel application of SNA to the study of hybrid software development, this research provides a structural perspective that complements existing survey- and framework-based studies and offers a foundation for future comparative and longitudinal analyses of hybrid development patterns.