Feature Driven Development

Here's an interview I recently did over two iChat sessions with Stefan Roock in Germany.

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it-agile consultant Stefan Roock interviewed Jeff De Luca, who founded Feature Driven Development (FDD) 10 years ago. Jeff talks about the roots of FDD, the character of agile methods and the relationship of FDD to eXtreme Programming (XP) and Scrum.

Jeff argues about agile dogma: “I am not religious about FDD as the one and only one true process, nor am I religious about process and method. What I am religious about is frequent, tangible working results, or reliably delivering working software in a timely manner.”

When coming to the question what method is suitable for what type of project Jeff points out: “I’m saying that the Agile methods are more suited to types of people and organisational cultures than types of project.”

Jeff underlines the importance of a upfront high-level modeling activity: “…there has to be some informational / analytical activity at the start to give us the knowledge to set a baseline that we can track and report against… FDD is the only agile method that gets this part right.”

In contrast with XP, FDD has class ownership. Jeff has a strong opinion about class ownership: “Collective ownership is code for ‘no ownership’. It's not a structure I believe in.”

Read the full interview using this link (which is a PDF file)