This report details part of the results of five software audits that were done to evaluate various aspects of the quality in five very big software projects. One result of our work was a method for software quality evaluation, which is described in detail elsewhere. Another result was a review of the software engineering practices and methods that were used throughout those projects by the development companies. The paper presents a survey of these practices and tries to answer the question which software development paradigms, processes and methods are used in the software industry and which of them can contribute to the final success of the project more than the others.