My little FDD rant

Ron Jeffries has questions about Feature Driven Development (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/agilemanagement/message/1399)

In response to these it was asked on the Agile Auckland mailing list if anyone had any experience of FDD. I rose to the bait, and wrote a short diatribe. There was absolutely no response. Whatsoever. No rebuttals, no argument, no agreement. Very weird. So I thought I would re-post my rant here, well, just to give it a home.

"I have had the misfortune to work for a company that believed in the great FDD way. To the extend that they had Jeff De Luca do in-house consulting.

I cannot see how FDD can be termed an 'Agile' methodology. With all the different roles it added huge layers of indirection, to the extent that the people at the top of the pyramid had no idea of what the issues in the code base really were, and thus made very bad decisions with respect to it. BTW, they were not interested in these issues, as they were things to be solved by the junior programmers. FDD was used as a "command and control" system with management hunched over their digital dashboards monitoring the progress on the feature list. Trying to change the feature list due discoveries made as the code was developed was like trying to turn the Titanic. And we have all seen the movie.

And the documentation! Documentation and process were king, and code was an incidental sideline. I have a huge problem with this because to me the design of an application is not the documentation. The design is the actual code of the application. The documentation associated with the code is either developed as part of the process of discovery as to what the code is to do, or as a guideline to others learning about the code. It is not the application!

When I left the company their new owners had decreed that "scrum" was to be the methodology used, as it was "what Microsoft do". But the entrenched management were not keen to let go of their FDD world, and were thus planning to "marry the best of both worlds". I kind of wish I could have seen the resulting train smash.

Ron Jeffries comments are well worth reading. He also nailed another issue I had with FDD as practised at this company: there was very little consultation with customers. Instead the marketing department drove the feature list. Potentially great for new sales, but bad for existing customers.

Ah, let me stop this rant. Avoid FDD, its just not agile!

My $1 worth Martin"

9:53:07 PM