Effective Software Project Management

The Launching Phase of an Incremental SDPM Strategy for the Feature-Driven Development Model

The Launching Phase of the Incremental SDPM strategy for the Feature-Driven Development model has all of the issues of the Staged Delivery Waterfall model and then some. The sequential increments can have concurrent swim lanes within the same increment. That makes life more difficult for the project manager for at least the following reasons:

• Scope changes can be affected by precedence relationships.

• Features not yet developed may render scope change requests unnecessary.

These difficulties are discussed in the subsections that follow.

Scope Changes Can Be Affected by Precedence Relationships

Scope changes do not necessarily align themselves to feature sets. By experiencing a feature set that has been completed, the customer may identify a needed change that has nothing to do with the feature set they experienced. Customers think in terms of functions and the features that support them. They do not think in terms of feature sets. Feature sets are not natural occurrences to customers. Therefore, their scope change request may be unrelated to the feature set from which the request emanated. Instead, it may be related to another feature set not yet developed, and therefore, it cannot be implemented until that feature set on which the change depends is built. The unfortunate thing about this situation is that it may not make any sense to the customer. The burden of an explanation is on the ...