Feature Driven Development

Research by the Cutter Consortium shows Feature Driven Development as the number 2 most popular agile methodology. The research also looks at the bigger issue of Agile vs Heavy methodologies and what percentage of projects are Agile. Read the research article here.

A study on the use and impact of Open Source and Free Software in the UK Government.
A very interesting whitepaper.

Here's a model proposed by Gardner and Trotta to see what impact a project has on your company's share price. The story is at cioinsight here and there are two PDFs of the model you can download and print for use. Essentially, it's a discounted cash flow on the money expected over the life of the project (future cash flow) taking into account the time and risk associated with doing the project (discounted cash flow) and then mapping that to a potential share price change.

I think it's quite interesting (and admirable) to try and extend a project metric all the way out to a company's share price.

The software is called ArgoUML, and is freely available from its homepage at http://argouml.tigris.org/.

ArgoUML is a Java CASE tool, used for UML modeling. It is written in Java itself, and thus runs on just about any platform with a JVM. I tested it under Debian GNU/Linux (as well as Windows) and it works beautifully.

It supports v1.3 of the UML standard, and uses the XMI interchange format for sharing UML models between different tools. It also suports the Object Constraint Language (OCL), although I haven't tested that support yet.

One very novel feature that I quite like is the dynamic Todo list. It appears at the bottom of the screen, and offers suggestions on how to improve your design (called the critics) and reminders on steps in the modeling process you may have forgotten (or just not got around to completing).

I just found an article at IDG with some interesting background information on Jeff and FDD:

Australia's Agile Connection

The conference is "aimed at exploring the human and social issues involved in software development and the consequences of the agile approach to developing software".

The conference has ACM SIGSOFT as a sponsor, and the committee list has some of the top names in the business. It certainly looks like an interesting conference.

For more details, including submission information for potential authors, visit the official site:

http://agiledevelopmentconference.com/

It is a very interesting book. I am reading it mainly for the UML modeling aspects, as it came well-recommended.

I like it so far, but I'm not convinced about this whole "don't worry about the requirements now, we'll sort them out in the end" attitude that the UP (and certainly eXtreme Programming) tend to favour.

I am certainly all for agile approaches, and using processes (and designs!) that are flexible enough to cope with change, at all phases of the project.

But I think I'm missing something about UP... In the inception phase, you don't fully specify requirements. But you don't in the elaboration phases either - or rather, you incrementally define use cases and gather requirements and do your design.

• Java Modeling in Color: Enterprise Components and Process, P Coad, E Lefebvre, J De Luca. Prentice Hall, 1999
• Agile Software Development Ecosystems, J Highsmith, Addison-Wesley, 2002
• A Practical Guide to Feature-Driven Development, S Palmer, J Felsing, Prentice-Hall, 2002

Both products are Open Source; NetBeans is released under a variant of the BSD license, while Eclipse is licensed under the Common Public License (CPL), which appears to be more like the GPL than the BSD license. NetBeans also has a supported commercial flavour, the Forte product from Sun. This hybrid model seems to be becoming very popular, and I shall write about it in a future blog (or article!).

At question is IBM's choice of GUI toolkit. While NetBeans uses Swing, and thus has the distinct advantage of running on just about any supported platform where there is a JVM, Eclipse has its own, called the Standard Widget Toolkit. Using the SWT means that IBM is eschewing the standard Java GUI toolkit. I don't really see this as such a big deal - there are plenty of development tools that aren't written in the same target language, so although NetBeans is in some ways more "pure", Eclipse still gives you a rich platform to build whatever 100% Pure Java applications you might wish to build.