Feature Driven Development

I guess I'm one of the younger members of this community, but don't let that fool you!

I have applied more of a vanilla implementation of FDD last year in my final year project at uni (16 developers), and recently just some aspects of it to my last J2EE project, which i worked on by myself reporting to two managers.

I have many views and still many questions on agile development. It's funny to me how so many IT professionals are looking "the next big thing" to fly straight into their laps, specifically I'm talking about those that view agile as being Fred Brooks'(sp) silver bullet for development.

This should probably go into the forum, however I think front page exposure might be good for what I'm proposing.

Last year, myself and 15 others from the University of Melbourne (Australia) developed a framework for the distributed simulation of catchment (rivers, dams) models, that dealt with large data sets using JXTA and other Java technologies. We had an 8 month time span to do this and it was quite a challenge. We were introduced to FDD by quite an avid fan and contributor to this community, Gavin Baker and compared to XP, RUP dx etc. it offered quite a wide range of benefits (most of which I'll talk about in a different post regarding what I found from a project manager perspective. Hopefully the CA from our team will publish his story on FDD as a CA).

computer systems and human organizations

A place to speak about complexity arguments applied to software development with no relation with any particular method, a group where everybody can speak about complexity, chaos, complex adaptive systems, etc, etc without the need to keep "On Topic".

Not only software development people but also others "men of science" interested in the field (biologists, mathematicians and, why not, experts in psychology and social interactions).

Starting from Mike Beedle work at http://www.livingmetaphor.org/ our main goals are:

When I first learnt about FDD, I was impressed by it's simplicity and clarity. As a development process, it stood well out from the crowd when compared to other far more cumbersome & complex processes that seemed only to make things harder. After learning more about FDD, my opinion of it as a development process was not in question, I wanted to use it. The issue was whether I could apply it to what I did, ie. web development And if that was possible, how to go about making it happen?

The short answer is yes, you can use FDD for web development. How? That's not so easy, as web development covers a wide range of project types, how to apply FDD will depend on the nature of the project at hand.

The original Visio file of the one page FDD process diagram if anyone needs to modify it for use.

De Luca on FDD Newsletter #2003-03

There is a problem that crosses gender, that crosses culture,and crosses international boundaries. Programmers all over the world - regardless of race, religion, sex or geography - have this significant word definition problem. The problem word is finished.

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A Practical Guide to Feature-Driven Development (The Coad Series) author: Stephen R. Palmer,John M. Felsing asin: 0130676152

This is a diagram I put together for my team based on Jeff De Luca's work and the book "A Practical Guide to Feature Driven Development"

A short but interesting article:

"Understanding the Psychology of Programming", by Bryan Dollery

Read on for the Abstract and some comments...

"Contrary to popular belief, programmers more frequently resemble artists than scientists. If you want to maximize the creative potential on your development team, you've got to start thinking about the psychology of the programmer and be willing to back it up with management policy."

The article begins with the presumption that programming is in many ways a creative activity. FDD considers devleopment to be a human activity, which is not exactly the same thing, but the principle that development is not a mechanical process is something that we can hopefully all agree on.