It’s a fact that the legacy systems of the past need to be replaced by newer systems as time goes by. These systems lack both the investment of user experience and the agile implementation lifecycle. As and when new systems are created, a strange type of marriage often occurs. I call this marriage Agile Hybridity.

Agile Hybridity is the result of waterfall dying out as the preferred implementation methodology. Stakeholders try to marry quick iterations with a great big waterfall deadline. This deadline does not include multiple releases or gradual user acceptance .

The downfall to waterfall and the hybrid application can be seen as:

* Less releases and feedback causes user experience overheads that are costly to rectify within bigger projects.

* Big release cycles carrythe risk of dumbing down team morale and making people leave quicker.

* Agile Hybridity doesn’t force developer growth. Instead developers may choose to pick small increments of work and remain stuck at their basic level of competence.

* A backlog of invisible legacy bugs is created because they are not immediately evaluated by users within release cycles.

Agile Hybridity seeks to be the answer within large scale projects but it is an elusive truth. Past experiences have tricked stakeholders in believing a system needs to be perfect and not adaptable. Innovation is a process not a large deadline.