Feature Driven Development

The main purpose of FDDI is to enable the exchange of FDD project related information between diverse software systems and components.

FDDI (f ĭ dˈē) is pronounced fiddy (as for the word giddy but replacing the g with an f).

I'd like to revisit (and hopefully reassert) the FDD view on version control, and configuration management.

In FDD we use the term "promote to build" as the final step in BBF, which directly refers to the action of promoting (re-labeling) a file in the CM system. Modern CM/VC systems such as Perforce and Microsoft Visual Studio Team System do not include the capability to do promotion groups and labeling. In a Perforce whitepaper, they explain that promotion groups lead to "bushy trees" which they describe as an anti-pattern.

I've seen some teams doing FDD advocate the notion that each Feature Team makes a branch for each Chief Programmer Work Package. This seems wrong to me. The claim is that modern tools make merging much easier than it was in earlier years and that the transaction cost of a branch and merge is almost zero.

The FDD Tools team is very happy to announce Release 0.8.7. which adds internationalization support and fixes couple of minor defects. This release includes localizations for English, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese. We welcome additional language contributions and corrections, and, as always, comments and recommendations.

As usual the release can be found on the FDD Tools website on SourceForge.

Here's a fascinating (to me) blog entry contrasting Apple engineers and Microsoft's.

Data Structures As Culture [scifihifi]

I've long been interested in these sorts or correlations or indicators, as I see them too and heavily use them in my interviewing.

Beyond the correlations/indicators though is the just as interesting aspect of this which is to do with simplicity. Developers, architects, solution designers, and so on - are (mostly) terrific at creating far more technology complexity than is justified.

FDDPMA is a free, open source, web-based FDD project management tools.
Version 1.2 is a result of field-testing on a mid-size project (16 developers, 4 Chief Programmers). It is deployed to fddpma.net and may be downloaded from sourceforge.net web site.

What's new?

• FDDPMA may automatically calculate completion percent for project stages based on the tasks. Define a list of tasks for each project stage. As you update completion percent for the tasks, FDDPMA will re-calculate completion percent for the stages and for the whole project.

Are ther plans to develop and deploy the FDD approach to Visual Studio Team System 2005?

Thanks
Al

Hi,

sorry but I still need some clarification concerning the currently planned and coming up workshops . Under Certification it's said:

Currently, you achieve FDD Aware status through either of the two Accredited FDD training workshops. What this says is that you are Certified as FDD Aware as you have successfully completed Accredited FDD training. If you successfully complete both Accredited workshops you achieve Certified FDD Associate status which is the foundation/essentials level.

Hi,

I currently working as an Architect in a large scale, quite complex, systems integration project involving integrating COTS (ERP, SCM) with in-house developed components (Data Warehouse, Enterprise Service Bus (Middleware), Integration Adaptors/Wrappers) and interfaces to legacy and customer / supplier systems.

We have major issues with requirements. The solution is supporting a brand new area of business the company has never been in before. Therefore, end users and managers in the business cannot provide us with any level of detailed requirements, only the high level business need. To compensate a good proportion of the team members have extensive experience in the domain. We already have an initial release of the solution live and successful. The current release we're working on is sustantially expanding the "solution footprint". We also have the issue of iterating requirements against COTS capabilities which, in turn, causes flux in design requirements for the middleware. For example the ERP consultant implements a particular use of an ERP object (e.g. process, states etc), the development team begin to map those states into events on the middleware for integration with other components, then a subsequent iteration with the business changes elements of the ERP model causing a number of design assumptions in the middleware to become invalid. We are protecting ourselves against this to a certain extent through the design of the middleware - extensive use of XML and XSLT in an open standards J2EE / JMS framework.

ITPS is pleased to announce the release of FDDTracker v1.2 which includes the following new functionality and enhancements:

- Full support for Project Aspects
- Document Management
- Support for Estimates / Actuals
- Support for Releases / Iterations
- Integrated LDAP (Active Directory / Domain) support
- Trend Report
- Progress by Aspect Report
- Feature Notes Report
- Ability to define milestone headings
- Ability to define status colours
- Data Export from Feature List
- Keyword Search in Feature List
- Enhanced Feature Maintenance
- Enhanced Options Maintenance

We are pleased to announce that the June 2005 release of FDD Manager, which includes the following enhancements, is now available for download.

• Enhanced reporting functionality that provides reports in both HTML and PDF formats.
• A new Cumulative Feature Status by Week chart.
• Ability to apply the same change to multiple nodes of the same type (eg: Features).
• Expanded user preferences in the System Setup to specify preferences on launch and exit.
• A new template facility for saving and reusing a base project.