Dynamic Systems Development Method - DSDM and The DSDM Consortium: Origins

DSDM and The DSDM Consortium: Origins

In the early 1990s, a new term (rapid application development - RAD) was spreading across the IT industry. The user interfaces for software applications were moving from the old green screens to the graphical user interfaces that are used today. New application development tools were coming on the market, such as PowerBuilder. These enabled developers to share their proposed solutions much more easily with their customers – prototyping became a reality and the frustrations of the classical, sequential (waterfall) development methods could be put to one side.

However, the RAD movement was very unstructured: there was no commonly agreed definition of a suitable process and many organisations came up with their own definition and approach. Many major corporations were very interested in the possibilities but they were also concerned that they did not lose the level of quality in the end deliverables that free-flow development could give rise to.

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).

At the initial meeting it was decided that Jennifer Stapleton, then of Logica, would put together an architecture for an end-to-end, user-centric but quality-controlled method for iterative and incremental development. The resulting architecture was designed to be fully compatible with ISO 9000 and PRINCE2, which were two major concerns for the group. Once the architecture was in place (a month after the initial meeting), the Consortium formed various task groups to populate it with all aspects of software development, including project management tools and techniques, quality and testing, development tools and techniques, personnel and software procurement. An oversight group led by the architect and consisting of the chairs of the task groups ensured consistency of the approach as it was developed.

Although many of the Consortium members were direct business competitors, they shared freely how they had addressed the various aspects. Best practice was extracted and formed into a cohesive whole. As the Consortium grew in its first year from a handful of organisations to sixty, the content of the method became increasingly robust. Version 1 was baselined in December 1994 and published in February 1995. The result was a generic method covering people, process and tools that was formed from the experiences of organisations of all sectors and sizes.

The DSDM Consortium is a not-for-profit, vendor-independent organisation which owns and administers the DSDM framework.