Just when I'm not looking Brad Appleton goes and posts two very useful articles featuring Feature Driven Development and UML in Color Domain Modeling.
Brad talks about the idea that FDD doesn't rely on tooling and sure it is true that FDD doesn't need tooling to work but it wouldn't be fair to say that it wasn't designed for it. In August 1997, the team in Singapore became the first team to use Together. FDD didn't exist. Jeff De Luca had his ideas on process and Peter Coad had the Coad Method. We were still inventing FDD. Together was a tool directly envisaged out of Peter's work on The Coad Method. In 1997, it was beta 0.4 (arguably an alpha product). He realized that documents became obsolete and that maintaining them was a wasteful drag on the process. However, he believed in the communication power of the design language and we went on to prove just how powerful it could be when we introduced color to pick out archetypes (as they were to become known). Hence, a tool was needed and that tool had to keep the code and the model synchronized - Together.
A color model from my office in downtown Seattle, February 2004
The technique is so powerful that I have walked past the door of a room in our office building in Kansas City, where some of my team were conducting a modeling session (back in 2000), and in a split second from my peripheral vision have been able to determine that the model was flawed. I stopped, went back, put my head in the door and told them that though I was delighted to see them working collaboratively on the architecture, I had a few questions about the model. I was due in our VPs office (at the end of corridor) but I would be back in an hour. An hour later, I returned and proceeded to ask a series of questions, that led to significant changes in the model - had these not been caught at this stage they would have led to refactoring or rework later on. Proper color modeling leads to code that is robust to change. It absorbs change gracefully. Refactoring is not generally required. Several days later, Daniel Vacanti came to me and said, "You knew didn't you? It wasn't an accident? How did you know?" I replied simply, "The colors were wrong."
Four years later Dan and I were now both living in Seattle and working together again. One morning he arrived in the office full of joy and proclaimed to me, "I can see the colors." After 4 years of using the technique, he had reached the point of mastery, the point where he could truly teach the subject. He could see the power in the pattern of colors that we call the Domain Neutral Component. Since then, Dan has written articles like this one on arguments over colors and is now writing a book with me on the topic. Color modeling allows me to "thin slice" on a logical architecture. In the blink of an eye I can generally tell if an OO model is highly cohesive and loosely coupled. I just can't imagine any code-based alternative that is so powerful. Sure, the code might be the whole truth but you simply can't walk past the door of a room with the listing pasted to the wall and determine the coupling and cohesion of the model at a glance. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, FDD, Peter+Coad, Daniel+Vacanti, UML, Domain+Modeling
