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InfoQ Homepage News InfoQ Interview: Hugh Ivory on DSDM's Public "Atern" Release

InfoQ Interview: Hugh Ivory on DSDM's Public "Atern" Release

Hugh Ivory is a Director of the DSDM Consortium, a core member of the DSDM Atern work group, and the mentoring coach of the DSDM method. In this video, he spoke with InfoQ at Agile2007 about this methodology, which is well-established in Europe and particularly in the UK. Perhaps the most important development is the change to public availability which has accompanied the release of V5, called DSDM "Atern". In addition, he provided an overview of both old and new customer-facing roles in DSDM.
DSDM is a framework for implementing Agile business change. The DSDM Consortium has been around since the mid ‘90s as a not-for-profit organization, which is responsible for the development of the method. In fact, the method is developed by practitioners from all types of organizations, and its roots are very much in Europe. We like to think of ourselves as the grandmother of the Agile methods.
The methodology, owned and collaboratively developed by the Consortium, was until recently only available to members. The big news at Agile2007 was that the public availability of the v5 or "Atern" release. The DSDM Consortium has made it an open framework. If you have been afraid of doing a little investigation and to find out about DSDM, because of the closed membership model, it's time to look again. All the materials that have been built over the years are freely available for people to view and to use on the DSDM website. Following are some hilights from the materials available on the site (free registration required).

Ivory discussed two of the Four Pillars of the DSDM Method, those of People and Process:


He also spoke about the roles included in DSDM's Team Organisation. Here's a model of how the roles are organised in a DSDM team:


Atern Lifecycle: The image below describes the iterative and incremental DSDM framework. It integrates a project management lifecycle and a product development lifecycle into a single process. For most organisations, DSDM is all that is needed to cover both although some gain value from integrating DSDM with more formal project management methods (e.g. PRINCE2TM or PMI).

 
Hugh Ivory is a Business Analyst and Program Management Practitioner with twenty five years experience facilitating IT-enabled change. He has been heavily involved in the work of the Consortium since 1999, and is a promoter of the DSDM framework in Ireland. Ivory founded Best Outcomes in 2000.

View the InfoQ interview: Hugh Ivory Reveals the New Face of DSDM.

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