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FDD used in a Final Year University Project

Thu, 02/12/2009 - 19:03 — elliotcoad

Hello,

I'm currently at Bournemouth University (UK), doing my final year project for my computing degree. I'm producing a piece of software, but I've chosen to try and follow FDD as the methodology, as the high-level view of it is compelling. I've got a base understanding of it, and "A Practical Guide to FDD" is sat next to me, waiting to be read. I was wondering if anyone who has used FDD has any advice on what would happen to an FDD project with just one person in the team behind it? What do you think could happen with the Six Key Project Roles being the responsibility of one?

Any thoughts would be invaluable to my study.

Also, would anyone be interested in my findings?

Thanks,
Elliot

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Fri, 02/13/2009 - 01:50 — Vernon
Vernon's picture

FDD in a one-man project

Hi Elliot,

You might want to look at FDDPMA and perhaps do a Google search for the author Serguei Khramtchenko. Serguei (a poster to these forums, and a Certified FDD Practitioner, used FDD to develop the FDDPMA tool as his Master's thesis. His thesis is available from the Sourceforge website at http://fddpma.sourceforge.net/help/fddpma_thesis.pdf. I think it might provide some insight into your questions.

(I hope Surguei doesn't mind my pointer to him:-) )

Thanks,
Vernon

Fri, 02/20/2009 - 00:01 — mangrish
mangrish's picture

Hi Elliot, Nice to see you

Hi Elliot,

Nice to see you are trying FDD out as a guide for your project.

I know some of the FDD guys have worked on small projects before and have basically merged roles together. For example on a 2 or 3 person project you might see the Project manager also being the technical architect and a chief programmer! You can use FDD for a 1 person project but you obviously a) you cannot parallelise your work, which is one of the great coordinating features of fdd b) since you are one person, your paths of communication and your need for overhead are reduced. you will still need to actively and visibily communicate with your client, but internally you maybe don't need things like integration machines (if you break it you will probably know about it!).

I think the great thing about things like FDD is that is lays down just enough so you can get going on achieving the goals of your project. Experienced developers and software managers can combine fdd with their own intuition on a project basis to formulate a success path for that one particular project.

I did something similar to you at uni using FDD about 6-7 years ago, but the only difference was my team was 16 people!

I think the best thing is to maybe find an industry mentor who can help you. There are lots of guys on the site here who could help out. alternatively i live in london if you want to go over anything over a beer!

:mark