All,
I have a question on how people think refactoring fits into FDD. It doesn't seem to fit to me, but I would still want to evaluate feature priorities including a refactoring task. In general, after reading the practical guide book, it seems like there is a lot of emphasis on the PD or the business area and not much cohesion between that and technical development aspects even though the book talks about UI and SI layers.
Thanks
Aaron
Hi,
I am involved in a somewhat larger project in the embedded domain. Traditionally, embedded systems have tremendously grown over the last couple of years whereas the ways of working have often remained, well, chaotic to ad-hoc at best. This also includes the way requirements are (not) captured.
In my cases, requirements come to us from Telco operators, product management, and a technical system group outside of the actual SW development. Our input is somewhere between Power Point and Excel.
In that context, I would have thought high-level use cases for capturing functional or at least the behavioral requirements would actually be a progress towards the right direction. However, having read about FDD I am somewhat confused. I have started wondering whether finer-grained features as suggested by FDD can be used INSTEAD of Use Cases or are a secondary step.
I love the new XML/GUI FDD Viewer tool. What do people use to track feature lists in general? Excel?
CALL FOR PAPERS
Cutter IT Journal
Jim Highsmith, Guest Editor
THE EVOLUTION OF AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT
The agile software development has always been, in part, about project
management, although the term "project management" carries a negative
connotation for some agile practitioners. But when you look at agile
software development methodologies such as DSDM, ASD, Scrum, Feature-driven
Development, and XP, you see that they all incorporate managing projects in
addition to their technical software development practices. XP, for example,
is weighted to technical practices (simple design, refactoring, etc.), but
it also has a few project management practices (iterative planning with
stories, for example). DSDM, on the other hand, has been almost entirely a
project management methodology with a few generic references to good
technical practices. Companies are now using agile project management (APM)
for projects beyond software development, and even hardware product
development efforts are using APM and other technical elements of agile
software development methodologies. New books are touting agile or adaptive
project management in their titles. Even the call for submissions for next
fall's PMI conference mentions APM.
| As a project manager I often get involved in a company's H.R. Practices when doing a project with them. It might be to help with hiring, it should always be to be involved in firing, and it might be to help with appraisals - i.e. rating and ranking staff. On many occasions, I have direct responsibility for all of these. There are many topics related to H.R. and I.T. that warrant discussion but I want to focus on ranking staff in this newsletter. |
I have a question about capturing requirements. I can see the usefulness of the feature naming template, especially as it seems to encourage a fairly fine granularity in the description of the features that can be described. What I do wonder though is how fine grained or even how generic a feature description could/should be. My concern is that we either spend too much time worring about the really nit-picky details early on, or that we end up providing estimates that are too short, or too long because our feature list isn't as fine-grained as it should.
Can anyone think of some examples of feature descriptions that they have considered either too generic, or too finely-grained for use under FDD? Is this something that only personal experience with FDD can teach us?
OK - it is time for people to fess up as they venture down the FDD route as seeking testimonials for our managers is quite difficult. I would like to hear answers to the following:
Hello all,
I have spent the last couple of evenings writing a utility that will display and print parking lots.
You can use whatever tool you like to capture data and when you want a parking lot report you can export the relevant bits to XML and use this viewer to read and display the data.
The plan is to distribute it free to whoever wants it. However, if you want to give me a 6 figure sum for a site license I might be able to be convinced.
At present I don't have anywhere to host the download and I am not sure what the etiquette is re uploading to this site. If anyone wants to try FDD Viewer please reply to this post and we will arrange something.
I'm guessing Excel would be used by a lot of people but what about the parking lot feature diagrams? What do people use to produce them? Visio?
