DSDM – Principles and approaches abiding the principles

Dynamic Software Development Method (DSDM) works with 8 principles basically abiding by its philosophy. The ultimate goal is the completed and successful project.

  1. Business requirements are the main focus
  2. Timely delivery
  3. Collaborate
  4. High Quality Standards
  5. Incremental approach in developing the software
  6. Develop iteratively
  7. Communicate continuously and clearly
  8. Good control on the overall process.

DSDM follows the 4 processes to achieve the project objective abiding by its philosophy throughout.

  • Feasibility
  • Foundations
  • Evolutionary developments

Including the pre-project and the post project there are totally 6 phases in a project life cycle. Feasibility gives a nod on whether we should continue with the project. The time spent in this phase should be just enough to prove that the project is worth carrying out. The team comes up with strong foundation on the requirement understanding, design approach. And the development begins. DSDM makes sure that it is making use of some of the best methodologies like time boxing, iterative development and MoSCow approach to deliver the same. The deployment phase does the review, deploy, and assemble etc.  to make the deliverable a working model. There will be rework based on the review comments and the deployment issues.

The practices used by DSDM to achieve its goals are:

Workshops: Facilitated workshop enables people to interact more resulting in more collaboration. The decisions are taken quickly and the team works to achieve the agreed upon goal. This is a very rapid way of decision making taking the consent from all the stake holders thus empowering the team in the process.

MoSCoW: it is a prioritization approach to manage priorities.  The letters stand for:

  •  Must Have(Minimum Usable SubseT (MUST) )
  •  Should Have
  •  Could Have
  •  Won’t Have this time

The business requirements should be broken down to the above 4 types and prioritization should be done accordingly.

Iterative Development: The development is segregated into multiple cycles where each cycle begins with a discussion of what requirements need to go in that cycle. It is a collaborative approach where each requirement is discussed on how it would be designed, developed and taken to completion.

Modelling techniques: This provides a visual representation of the requirements. They provide an early insight on whether the requirements will suffice the business needs. This can be achieved by using prototypes, mock-ups, network diagrams, process diagrams etc.

Time boxing: A fixed timeframe in which the objective has to be met. The objective might be a small set of the entire business requirements for that timeframe. The focus is on developing a small set of products incrementally. This can vary from 2 weeks to 4 weeks in general or this could be just a day activity also.  Time box comprises of 3 major steps

  • Investigation – Confirming on all the requirements deliverable by this time box.
  • Refinement – Implementing the requirements on agreed priorities.
  • Consolidation- Making sure the products pass the agreed acceptance criteria.

Time boxing works in collaboration with MoSCoW approach.

Communicating clearly and regularly is a key factor in a project’s success. DSDM provides lot of importance to effective communication skills and builds more trust into the team.

About Sparsh Goyal

A passionate IT professional, Sparsh Goyal boasts of 4.3+ years of experience. He has worked for various projects under AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Spring Boot, Python, Microservices, RESTful, RESTFUL APIs/SOAP, Scripting, Shell and JAVA. He is also working towards gaining proficiency in Oracle Cloud PaaS, DevOps, SaaS and Docker/Kubernetes. His primary and secondary skills validate his relentless pursuits of expanding his horizon and developing more as an IT person. He boasts of the following certifications: *Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer. *AWS Cloud Solutions Architect Associate. *Oracle certified JAVA programmer.

0 thoughts on “DSDM – Principles and approaches abiding the principles”

  1. A concise discussion of the 8 DSDM principles. I have read a number of online post about this subject and I’ve found this post easy to understand.

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