Using FDD for Small Project: An Empirical Case Study

Empirical analysis evaluates the proposed system via practical experience and reveals its pros and cons. Such type of evaluation is one of the widely used validation approach in software engineering. Conventional software process models were performed well till mid 1990s but then gradually were replaced by agile methodologies. This happened due to the various features, the agile family offered, which the conventional models failed to provide. However besides the advantages, agile models lacked at some areas as well. To get the extreme benefits from any agile model, it is necessary to eliminate the weaknesses of that model by customizing its development structure. Feature Driven Development (FDD) is one of the widely used agile models in software industry particularly for large scale projects. This model has been criticized by many researchers due to its weaknesses such as explicit dependency on experienced staff, little or no guidance for requirement gathering, rigid nature to accommodate requirement changes and heavy development structure. All these weaknesses make the FDD model suitable only for large scale projects where the requirements are less likely to change. This paper deals with the empirical evaluation of FDD during the development of a small scale web project so that the areas and practices of this model can be identified with empirical proof, which make this model suitable only for large projects. For effective evaluation, the results of FDD case study are compared with a published case study of Extreme Programing (XP), which is widely used for small scale projects.