3.2 Team Organization and Size
The usual DSDM project consists of one or two teams, where any second team might
take the responsibility to run tests on the development team products. Organizational
research suggests that more than 5 people (excluding external experts) on a single
team are ideal; it is strongly advised against larger then 6 person teams. If more work
has to be done than a single team can deliver, a multi team structure is required,
DSDM projects have documented project sizes of up to 150 people. In large projects
the decomposition of tasks may not only be functional, but should be task oriented as
well. Several projects found that a testing team and a development team for any
single feature set are useful, the rational being, that the larger the project, the most
important the quality of each component is. Since testing is a destructive labor, it’s
usually more effective not to leave it to the author of a product. Teams are assigned to
a task/timebox bundles (see chapter 4 for details on timeboxing). Figure 1 illustrates a
simple team organization where the test and development tasks are decomposed into
different teams, coordinated by technical lead and project manager. All gray symbols
related to part-time participants. [YEBO83]
3.3 7 Phases to Rule Them
The DSDM development process consists of 7 phases, of which some might be
omitted in a concrete project implementation. Each phase owns several key tasks (see
figure 2) and can be modified to include more tasks as appropriate, which might be
required when combining DSDM with other development methods. Especially
DSDM does not specify which technical tasks are to be carried out in each iteration,
allowing DSDM to be used in a wide variety of situations and projects, because it
allows to populate it’s framework by individual organizational practices. Three
phases are designed as iterations, meaning, that they are to be executed in each
increment.
DSDM does specify concrete results for each task and for each one of the three phase
groups (FMI, DBI and Implementation). However the result specification is general
enough to use DSDM in engineering projects and business projects alike. The
following describes the 7 phases as shown in figure 2.