Thursday, February 02, 2006

D-Cubed

I recently read about a most interesting innovation in software development methodology I've heard in a while: Defect Driven Design (D3, pronounced "D Cubed"). This methodology addresses the weak points of most other development methodologies.

Working in D3 is very simple. At the start of the project, you announce that all development is complete and the application is ready for user acceptance testing. The first thing the user will say is "Hey, I thought there was supposed to be an icon on the desktop to launch the application". That's our first defect. We implement code to put an icon on the desktop and announce again that we are done. The user clicks on the icon and nothing happens: "Where is the application?" That's our next defect. You can imagine what the rest of the development rhythm.

The brilliance in this methodology lies in the estimation power. We can estimate with absolute accuracy: 0 days. The entire lifecycle lies in maintenance, which is more realistic because useful software is never actually complete.

1 comment:

foomonkey said...

Brilliant! I am going to demand that we implement D3 here at work!