The DSDM Consortium was founded in 1994 by an association of vendors and experts in the field of software engineering and was created with the objective of "jointly developing and promoting an independent RAD framework" by combining their best practice experiences. The origins were an event organised by the Butler Group in London. People at that meeting all worked for blue-chip organisations such as British Airways, American Express, Oracle and Logica (other companies such as Data Sciences and Allied Domecq have since been absorbed by other organisations).
DSDM fixes cost, quality and time at the outset and uses the MoSCoW prioritisation of scope into musts, shoulds, coulds and won't haves to adjust the project deliverable to meet the stated time constraint. DSDM is one of a number of Agile methods for developing software and non-IT solutions, and it forms a part of the Agile Alliance.
In 2007, DSDM was rebranded 'DSDM Atern'.[4][5] The name Atern was a shortening of Arctic tern - a collaborative bird[citation needed] that can travel vast distances and epitomises many facets of the method which are natural ways of working e.g. prioritisation and collaboration.
In 2014, DSDM dropped the branding 'Atern' and reverted to its original name in the latest version of the method in the 'DSDM Agile Project Framework' positioned as "an ideal wrapper for more limited Agile frameworks... DSDM is often used to provide the full 'project' focus to compliment Scrum's team focussed product development process.". At the same time the new DSDM manual recognised the need to operate alongside other frameworks for service delivery (esp. ITIL) PRINCE2, Managing Successful Programmes, and PMI-BOK.[6] In addition DSDM can be easily accommodated as part of wider agile management approaches.[7] The previous version (DSDM 4.2) had only contained guidance on how to use DSDM with Extreme Programming.