IT Employment

I have had some success in using Feature Driven Development, but concerned about how an FDD project would 'fit' into an integration project or as a programme sub-project where not all other projects use FDD.

The pressure to deliver to pre-defined goals offsets some of the benefits of FDD, as other projects often drive their milestones and interim builds based on traditional waterfall approaches.

Finally, without management buy-in and support for what appears to be potentially ever-changing programs (i.e. a program is not written once, but iteratively) there is likely to be considerable resistance to the approach.

General feeling - good approach, often not very different/radical compared to skilled use of phased waterfall development planning. It does allow a better reakdown of an architecture prior to development, which tends to flush out problems. Sensible choices for initial iterations can also be used to highlight key or problem areas far earlier than waterfall methods.

My personal favourite of the agile approaches due to it's proven use for larger projects.