FDD - Is it Agile?
Today on the way to work I skip read Paler and Felsing's Feature Driven Development before I returned it to the office. I was struck by how anti-agile the book is, although I do see that Nebulon promotes Agile FDD, and XP/TDD can be found on the FDD portal. The book did have some interesting things to say on "Attracting, Recognizing, and Keeping Good People" (page 25). But the anti-agile viewpoint did begin to appeared from page 42 onwards, where class (code) ownership was presented as a superior alternative to collective ownership - Paired programming, continual integration TDD being associated with collective ownership. There was also no talked about TDD, only Unit Testing.
An overview of FDD can be found on Peter Coad site. In a nutshell, FDD consists of five processes:
- Develop an overall model
- Build a feature list
- Plan by feature
- Design by feature
- Build by feature
A comparison of FDD vs XP can be found here, with fixed price FDD discussed here. I'd agree with Tesugen that FDD does too much modelling before actual coding begins, from an XP perspective.
So in summary maybe it was the early morning skip reading that clouded my view of FDD, since FDD based on the links I provided above does appear to accept XP, TDD etc.