How to Deliver Business Value with Feature-Driven Development
As a Product Owner, one of your most important roles is making sure that you deliver business value.
But this provides you with many challenges. How do you create products that consumers and clients will find genuinely useful? And how do you make these products quickly without sacrificing quality in the process?
The answer is feature-driven development or FDD.
What Is Feature-Driven Development?
Pioneered by Jeff De Luca in 1997, feature-driven development is a form of Agile software development that works with teams of all sizes.
FDD is effective as it promotes several industry best practices into one, each practice promoting client-valued functionality. Client valued functionality makes your software hugely useful to customers and fits in with The Lean Startup method.
These five best practices include: developing an overall model, building a feature list, planning by feature, designing by feature and building by feature.
How Feature-Driven Development Brings Value to Your Customers
Because ‘usefulness to the customer’ is at the centre of feature-driven development, it’s very hard to go wrong in terms of providing value to them.
The ‘develop overall model’ allows you to gather knowledge of the problem and how you plan to solve it, whilst the build feature list decides which features will contribute to the solution. From the get-go you have a streamlined journey in developing a quality, useful app.
This is incredibly important as solving customer problems sees them trust you and become loyal to your business. And if you’ve successfully solved their problem, they’ll spread the word and help increase your user base.
Furthermore, FDD promotes using client-valued functions expressed as “<action> <result> <object>” with some examples being ‘Calculate the total of a sale’ or ‘Validate the password of a user’.
In this way, not only can you solve the client’s needs faster, but you can also make the experience far more enjoyable too.
Quality Assurance and Short Development Cycles
While feature-driven development also has benefits on the customer side of things, it also makes development significantly easier for your team too. This is thanks to the ideas of quality assurance (milestones), development plans and development cycles.
After finalizing the list of features, these are then assigned to programmers, selected and prioritized the team to complete weekly sprints.
Should the features take more time to complete, it may be wise to break them down into smaller tickets. Time limits are especially important as they make sure you do not waste energy or resources with a poor ROI (Return on Investment) feature.
When outsourcing to teams like ours at EL Passion, FDD can also help with delivering an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in a shorter amount of time. This lets you launch to market quicker, with a better chance of success.
Milestones meanwhile, lets your teams track their progress efficiently. Every feature goes through six milestones including: domain walkthrough, design, design inspection, code, code inspection and promote to build.
In working this way you can ensure that features aren’t making it to the users without having been thoroughly tested.
Including a feature with huge mistakes could be disastrous. Feature-driven development helps you avoid this and it’s just one more reason why you should employ it as a development strategy.
