Monday, June 27, 2005

FDD - an agile alternative to XP

I think there are a lot of folks out there who judge all of "Agile" by what they know of Extreme Programming (XP), quite possibly because that is all or most of what they've heard about agile development.

I think folks (especially agile skeptics) should take a close look at Feature-Driven Development (FDD) if for no other reason than because it is an example of an agile method that is very different from XP. FDD is quite agile while still employing of many of the traditional practices that agile skeptics are probably more accustomed to seeing.

For example, FDD has the more traditional progression of waterfall-ish phases in its iterations (while still being highly iterative and collaborative). FDD does conduct up-front planning, design and documentation and relies very heavily upon domain modeling. FDD also uses feature-teams with chief architects/programmers and traditional code-ownership and code-review (as opposed to pair-programming and refactoring).

To that end, here are some more resources about FDD so folks can learn more about it and become more aware of the fact that XP isnt the only agile "game" in town when it comes to development practices (SCRUM and DSDM are focused primairly on planning rather than development practices):

2 comments:

clarke said...

Thanks Brad. Nice list of resources. It's really hard to find out more info about it.

Anonymous said...

Ah....thanks Brad, this is exactly what I have been hunting for all morning.

Much appreciated.