Project Patterns

Creating project patterns in xProcess requires you to think about what are the framework parts of youroverall process. The diagram above shows a project pattern for a variant of Feature-Driven Development (FDD) and it's interesting to see how much of the process has been modeled here and how much elsewhere.

If you read the books on FDD - for example the one by Steve Palmer and Mac Felsing is a good one - you'll see that FDD is classicly drawn as 5 stages: Build a Domain Model; Build a Features List; Plan by Feature; Design By Feature; Buld by Feature. You can see from our pattern diagram that 2 of these stages did not make it into the project pattern. Why is that? There's a simple explanation: the last 2 stages in this description are repeated for each and every feature. These 2 stages are modeled within the Feature pattern so that their activities occur each time a feature is instantiated.

You can also see the project pattern contains the first 2 Timeboxes of the project (subsequent ones will be instantiated from the Timebox pattern). This is also a useful idea: put the parts of the process that you know should happen at the start of every project within the project pattern.