Comparison between Adaptive Software Development and Feature Driven Development

Agile methods gain the upper hand over traditional software development methods when it comes to constant customer participation, customer satisfaction with early project delivery and acceptance of requirement changes at any stage of software development life cycle. So the practice of agile methods has been increasing in recent years. Some of the well-known agile methods that are in practice today are Adaptive Software Development, Feature Driven Development, Scrum, eXtreme Programming. A comparison among different agile methods helps managers who need to introduce agility into their organization by providing a thorough knowledge on different features and aspects of the agile methods. By comparing different agile methods, managers can easily choose the agile method that best suites his project requirements and organizational characteristics. Different comparison techniques to compare agile methods were introduced in recent years by researchers. We have compared the agile methods Adaptive Software Development and Feature Driven Development in order to evaluate their degree of agility and coverage degree with respect to the two Knowledge Areas of SWEBOK, (1) Software Requirements, (2) Software Construction. The result of our comparison shows that Adaptive Software Development mainly differs from Feature Driven Development because there are no predefined techniques or specific practices that are meant to be followed in Adaptive Software Development. Feature Driven Development has some predefined techniques or practices that are to be followed during software development. The principle of Adaptive Software Development is to focus more on results rather than steps to achieve that result. A technique is only implemented if it is necessary to get the best output in Adaptive Software Development.