Feature-Driven Development: A Brief Overview

Feature-Driven Development (FDD) is a five-step Agile framework that focuses on making progress on features in one to two-week sprints. The methodology assigns roles and utilizes project management best practices for consistency, making it easier for new team members to onboard. FDD involves six primary roles: Project Manager, Chief Architect, Development Manager, Chief Programmer, Class Owners, and Domain Expert. The first two phases of an FDD project focus on the overall project, while the final three steps are repeated for each feature defined in the model. Advantages to FDD include fewer meetings, better communication through documentation, and a short-iteration process that breaks large projects into smaller chunks. Feature flags complement FDD by allowing features to be separated from deploys, enabling developers to release features incrementally while still working on them.