Feature-Driven Development: Introduction
The introduction describes the origins of the Feature-Driven Development process and introduces the key people involved with its beginnings. These include Jeff De Luca, an independent software consultant based in Melbourne Australia, and well-known industry figure, Peter Coad. Like many of the early agile development approaches, Feature-Driven Development evolved out of a real need on a real software development project.
The introduction also introduces the example used throughout the book and explains why the authors slip into role playing dialogues every now and again.
A development team on which I was working in Singapore in October 1997 had just finished an awesome month working with object modeling expert, Peter Coad. Having built an initial, overall object model of the problem domain, the team needed a process to guide them through the low level design and implementation of the required system features. After a small committee failed to reach consensus, Jeff De Luca, the project manager and technical architect, took on the task himself.
What Jeff delivered was a set of five simply described processes covering the building of an overall domain object model and the listing, planning, design and implementation of features. The first of these processes described the approach Peter Coad had used during the initial object modeling session. The second process incorporated Peter's ideas of using a features list, developing feature by feature, and naming features using a helpful template. The other ingrediants and the blending into a cohesive process was the result of Jeff's experience, project patterns and practices that he had proven time and time again over the years. Paul Szego and I, among others, helped add and refine details as we applied the processes on a day-to-day basis over nearly two years.
Therefore, the marketing phrase on the back cover of the book stating that I was one of the creators of the FDD process is not one I like because I feel it misrepresents my role in FDD's development. I believe my involvement was significant but I would not call myself an inventor or creator of FDD. That accolade really belongs to Jeff De Luca with full acknowledgement of Peter's significant contributions and influence.
The following year, Jeff and Peter collaborated to produce the description of FDD that appeared as Chapter 6 in the book Java Modeling in Color with UML. This book was published by Prentice Hall in 1999. This version was tailored by Peter to fit the 'modeling in color' technique used in the rest of the book and as a result was not as generic as the original set of process descriptions.
In 'A Practical Guide to Feature-Driven Development' (published by Prentice Hall in 2002) I returned to a more general description decoupled from 'modeling in color' (although still recognising 'modeling in color' as a great technique that complements FDD beautifully).
The foreword and introduction in A Practical Guide... expand a little more on the history and the people involved. The foreword is written by Peter Coad who is also the series editor