Page 80 - DCAP405_SOFTWARE_ENGINEERING

Unit 5: An Agile View of Process

Growth is iterative and incremental, driven by users’ feedback to converge on an effective Notes
business solution.

All changes during the growth are reversible.
The high level scope and requirements should be base-lined before the project starts.
Testing is carried out all through the project life-cycle.
Communication and co-operation among all project stakeholders is required to be efficient
and effective.
Prerequisites for using DSDM

In order for DSDM to be an accomplishment, a number of fundamentals need to be realized.
First, there needs to be interactivity between the project team, future end users and higher
management. This addresses well known breakdown of IS development projects due to lack of
top management motivation and/or user involvement.
The second significant prerequisite for DSDM projects is the decomposability of the project. The
possibility of decomposition into smaller parts allows the iterative approach, and activities,
that are hard to prioritize, often causes delays. And that is accurately the effect that DSDM was
developed to avoid. Another group of projects for which DSDM is not well-suited are safety-
critical ones. The extensive testing and validation found in these kinds of projects collide with
DSDM goals of being on time and on budget. Finally, projects that aim at reusable mechanism
might not be well-suited for development using DSDM, because the demands on perfection are
too high and collide with the 80%/20% principle described earlier.

The Phases of DSDM

The DSDM structure consists of three sequential phases, namely the pre-project, project life-
cycle and post-project phases. The project phase of DSDM is the most detailed of the three phases.
The project life-cycle phase consists of 5 stages that form an iterative step-by-step approach in
developing an IS. The three phases and corresponding stages are explained extensively in the
subsequent sections. For each stage/phase, the most significant activities are addressed and the
deliverables are mentioned.

Phase 1: The Pre-project
In the pre-project phase applicant projects are identified, project funding is realized and project
commitment is ensured. Handling these issues at an early stage avoids problems at later stages
of the project.
Phase 2: The Project Life-cycle
The process summary in the figure above shows the project life-cycle of this phase of DSDM. It
depicts the 5 stages a project will have to go through to create an IS. The first two stages, the
possibility Study and Business Study are sequential phases that complement to each other. After
these phases have been completed, the system is developed iteratively and incrementally in the
Functional Model Iteration, Design & Build Iteration and Implementation stages. The iterative
and incremental nature of DSDM will be addressed further in a later section.
Feasibility Study

Business Study
Functional Model Iteration

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