What is Feature Driven Development?
Feature-Driven Development (FDD) is one of the agile processes and is client centric and pragmatic software process. It consist of 5 different basic activities, for accurate state reporting and keeping track of the software development project, milestones that mark the progress made on each feature are defined.

• Develop overall model - he FDD project starts with a high-level walkthrough of the scope of the system and its context.
• Build feature list - The knowledge gathered during the initial modeling is used to identify a list of features, by functionally decomposing the domain into subject areas.
• Plan by feature - Our next step is to produce the development plan; assigning ownership of features (or feature sets) as classes to programmers.
• Design by feature - Programmers then produce a design package for each feature with a chief programmer selecting a group of features that should be developed within a two-week period. The chief programmer will also establish detailed diagrams for each feature while refining the model. When this is complete, prologues are produced and a design inspection is carried out.
• Build by feature - Once design inspections are complete, designers plan an activity for each feature and develop the code for their respective classes. When the inspection is complete and a unit test carried out, the feature is then pushed to the main build.

How FDD will help you?
Because of above mentioned basic activities, have continually been used to develop enterprise software because it is seen as both agile and pragmatic. It takes key advantages of extreme Programming and Scrum and combines them with model-centric techniques including Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evan and modeling in color by Peter Coad. In addition, it is easily scaled to large teams due to its concept of just enough design initially (JEDI), as well as peer reviews and dynamic feature teams.

Benefits by Cotocus Role –
To see how requirements can be organized by functional area, they must be fairly well understood and so a design is created. From the design is derived a feature list at which point the iterative implementation cycles can begin. Consequently, and as with some other methods, the first two phases of the FDD process are not iterative but take place just once which narrows the iterative part of the project, and so it could be argued that the agility of the overall project is reduced.
At the same time there are some real benefits to this approach. For example, with each functional area written all at once there is less need to refractor than with a process where the same code might be repeatedly changed. Not surprisingly, less refactoring is one of the benefits of traditional development methods so in some sense FDD can be argued to combine both traditional and Agile approaches.

Cotocus FDD team
When your company requires better software planning tools, there are a lot of choices in the marketplace. However, if you want the best in agile software development with there is only one solution.
Cotocus is a complete software project management system in one package, that manages your project's requirements, releases, iterations, tasks and bugs/issues. Designed specifically to support agile methodologies such as FDD, Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), DSDM and Agile Unified Process (AUP) it allows teams to manage all their information in one environment.

How Cotocus helps you?
Cotocus provides reporting dashboards of key project quality and progress indicators - requirements test coverage, task progress, project velocity, as well as top risk and issues in one consolidated view that is tailor made for agile software development methodologies as well as supporting your legacy/hybrid waterfall projects. The top reasons that customers choose Cotocus over other solutions are:

• It is a complete solution that includes requirements management, release planning, iteration planning, task estimation and defect tracking all fully integrated from day one.

• Highly intuitive web application that provides a complete picture of a project’s status and health yet requires only a web-browser.

• Methodology Agnostic –  cc can be used equally web for any agile software development methodology  including Scrum, AUP, XP, DSDM

• Ability to leverage your existing technology investments.  cotocus  integrates with many third-party defect-management systems and software configuration management (SCM) systems.

In addition, we provide superb technical support that ensures that enquiries and questions are dealt with in a timely and professional manner.