Atern (son of DSDM) now defines three 'Focus Streams': Business Focus; Solution Focus; Management Focus. Oh Dear, Us, Them & the Management. Hardly encouraging.
Rather than Atern's Management focus, I thought agile teams were self-organising and had full responsibility for their actions? Why does management have a different view of what they are doing?
Solution focus and Business focus seem to splits the developers from the business personnel - hardly what we want to happen in an agile project. Surely different blends of the basic activities can be used to achieve the same results without loss of coherence in the development?
With Atern we go from 5 phases in DSDM - Feasibility Study, Business Study, Functional Model, Design & build Implementation - to 7 by renaming them as Feasibility, Foundations, Exploration, Engineering & Deployment and wrapping in pre- & post-project phases around them.
Rubbish!. There should be no Pre- or Post- Project - how can it be part of a project methodology if is pre-Project? What next, Ante-Pre-Project? Pre-Post-Project?
Just admit that each project is embedded in the bigger project called "the business & there are no pre- or post-project phases. They are the preceding and succeeding steps in the big project.
If we accept the Agile principle of continuous releases then there can be no dedicated Implementation / Deployment phases isolated at the end of the project - this is a sop to small minds used to waterfall projects. Continuous integration, continuous releases.
With multiple developers and syncronous testing, the exploration/functional model and engineering/design & build follow in waves throughout the project. It might be nice to clarify that a particular timebox is exploring possibilities, or that it is meant to be generating a coded solution, but that is just emphasis, and comes dangerously close to suggesting that they are sequential activities and not iterative, contstantly looping around and supporting each other.
I would always follow the small scale DSDM recommendations and merge Feasibility (Study) and Foundations/Business Study in to a Problem/Business Case/Opportunity Study - what would be a good name? Business Study sounds pretentious, Problem Study implies a "bug", Opportunity Study is marketing hype.
Nor should we canning it Planning, or that might be taken to mean planning only occurs up-front & is set in stone.