Driven Development

There is a trend in the agile community to name development philosophies as driven, for example: TDD and BDD and DDD. Names for principles and methods to help us stay on track and to guide us toward good practices.

I thought it might be worthwhile to name some of the other development styles I’ve seen, to help us stay on track and to guide us away from bad practices, (beware irony ahead):

FFDD Favourite Feature Driven Development: when the determining factor in the code you write is some cool feature of the language you use or a preferred programming technique. Everything is a list to unrepentant lispers. Operator overriding is another favourite. They say everything is a look up problem at one well known company. Closely related are Favourite Language Driven Development and Favourite Library Driven Development.

FPDD Favourite Pattern Driven Development: a very popular variety of the FFDD family of development methods—because everything is better with Template Methods.

PDD Personality Driven Development: where your design decisions are based on following someone else's notions, not making your own decisions nor taking into account the current circumstances. If the personality in question is outside the team it’s Guru Driven Development and from inside the team it’s Charisma Driven Development.

PoLRDD Path of Least Resistence Driven Development: polaroid development can have many symptoms: doing things because it’s the way it’s always been done, or wanting to commit changes in someone else's name because you've worked to their priorities. After all it's their product, they're the owner, client, lead, etc.

DADD Decision Avoidance Driven Development: might be seen as a whole company variety of PoLRDD and is often presented as iterative development, affectionately known by some as Hot Potato Driven Development.

LoCDD Lines of Code Driven Development: and it’s more subtle variant proportion of lines of code delivered to production driven development, also known as POLOC DD. The driving principle is that if you don’t need it you can delete later but every keystroke spent on tests and infrastructure is stolen from production.

SDD Seniority Driven Development: the old guys do new stuff and the new guys do old stuff, which is often organised in new development teams and maintenance teams and accompanied by such practices as “I know this system better than anyone and I'm sure this patch is okay so just pop it into production”, and “it worked on my machine”.

CPDD Cool Puzzle Driven Development: overlapping with both FFDD and PDD is the philosophy in work environments dominated by technophiles of doing what you are best motivated to do, of course some dull things have to be done, but that’s how new hires learn the system.