  Background: Agile methods are no longer restricted to small projects and
co-located teams. The last decade has seen the spread of agile into large
scale, distributed and regulated domains. Many case studies show successful
agile adoption in GSD, however, taken as a whole, it remains unclear how
widespread this trend is, and what form the agile adoption takes in a global
software development (GSD) setting.
  Aims: Our objective is to gain a deeper understanding of how organisations
adopt agile development methods in distributed settings. Specifically we aim to
plot the current development process landscape in GSD.
  Method: We analyse industrial survey data from 33 different countries
collected as part of the project that explored the wider use of hybrid
development approaches in software development. We extract and analyse the
results of 263 surveys completed by participants involved in globally
distributed projects.
  Results: In our sample, 72 of globally distributed projects implement a mix
of both agile and traditional approaches (termed `hybrid'). 25 of GSD
organisations are predominantly agile, with only very few (5) opting for
traditional approaches. GSD projects that used only agile methods tended to be
very large.
  Conclusions: Globally Distributed Software Development (and project size) is
not a barrier to adopting agile practices. Yet, to facilitate project
coordination and general project management, many adopt traditional approaches,
resulting in a hybrid approach that follows defined rules.
