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In the past decade, development cycles for such products have shrunk from a year or more to one to three months, to accommodate rapid and significant feature changes. Coincidentally, there is a growing interest in agile methodologies such as Extreme Programming and Scrum that are more formal than hacking and less formal than traditional methods. Although agile and plan-driven methods are likely to be successful in their home ground, in many projects a hybrid mix of these methods might be most appropriate. We believe it is critical for developers to understand the pros and cons of some of the more popular practices so that they can better balance quality, cost, and development speed, and avoid reinventing solutions. Beyond the work of highly visible leaders, such as Microsoft and Netscape, little is known about high-speed software development - the processes and steps to retaining quality in this accelerated cycle. To this end, we conducted an empirical study of high-speed software development practices in US companies. As the "Anatomy of an Empirical Study" sidebar explains, we first reviewed detailed case studies of Internet software development in 10 companies and then synthesized knowledge on best practices for quality and agility.