2.2.4 Responding
Welcoming change and responding to change is rooted in principle 6 and partially in
principle 7. The management of changing business demands is commonly perceived
as the most prominent difference of agile and traditional methods. DSDM handles
change in a variety of ways, mainly through prioritization as described in Chapter 3.
2.3 The DSDM Philosophy
The DSDM framework itself is a very dynamic and modular system. While
developing, DSDM designers were interested in the “edge case” rather then a mere
project “ingredient”, meaning that it’s most important to know what choice to make
when time constraints are applied.
DSDM doesn’t require it’s user to implement the whole project structure, it only
demands strict obedience to the 9 principles, apart from that, any project manager can
implement a development process resulting to be more or less agile, depending on the
situation and the constraints, even combining DSDM with other methodologies is
allowed, even welcome, in several environments. The core idea of DSDM being: “No
plan will ever survive the first day of development.” is why the framework
recommends many techniques to handle these dynamics. Finally DSDM does not aim
to solve all development problems, when the 9 principles can not be implemented,
DSDM is most likely not the best choice.
2.4 Yet another Guide on Good Project Management?
The DSDM principles suggest that a lot of the current best practices where collected,
synchronized and consistently wrapped into a single methodology. That’s exactly
what happened, and what the intentions were in 1994 when the first version of DSDM
has been released. Nowadays version 4.2 has been released. DSDM will always
continue to be a best practice framework, but rather then other best practice
frameworks the DSDM consortium acknowledges that the environments of many
projects change, and adapts the framework to these requirements. [DSDM04]