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What’s Driving the ‘Driven’ Approaches?


Are there real differences between methodologies, or is it just marketing?

By Jennifer deJong
May 15, 2007 — 
It’s enough to drive a development manager crazy.

Model-driven development. Test-driven development. Feature-Driven Development. Requirements-driven development. There is even search-driven development.

Use of the word “driven” to describe a development approach is so widespread that the term has begun to signal a marketing strategy instead of

a methodology for writing software. “You talk about test-driven development because you sell testing tools. You talk about model-driven because you sell modeling tools,” said Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond.

That is not to say that model, test and other “driven” practices aren’t for the most part legitimate. They are. Test-driven development, for example, is an agile practice whereby developers don’t write a single line of code without first creating a test to verify whether or not the code works, said Dave Churchville, CEO of agile project tool provider ExtremePlanner Software. Test-driven development is really a misnomer as the practice is not about testing. “It’s about the intent: making sure the code does what it is supposed to do.”

Test-driven development is a concrete, valuable practice, noted Forrester analyst Carey Schwaber. “But people misuse the phrase.” She also said that tool makers are betting that the term “driven” will get development managers who depend on one of their offerings to buy additional, interrelated tools they sell.

“‘Driven’ is the use case for integration,” she said. “You have one tool; you need to buy the next. That is why vendors like [the term].”

Feature-Driven Development isn’t about tools at all. It’s an agile methodology, much the same way Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum and Crystal are, said Churchville. The approach is based on stories, known as features, that detail how a user will interact with an application, he explained.

THE CASE FOR MODEL-DRIVEN
But sometimes “driven” is part of a new name for an old idea, said Churchville. “Model-driven development used to be called CASE, he noted, referring to the acronym for Computer-Aided Software Engineering. “It’s a rebranding, a second coming.”

That said, model-driven development refers to a specific practice where diagrams created in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) are used not just as a visual guide, but also as the foundation for an application, said John Carillo, a senior director for Telelogic, which sells modeling and requirements tools, among other offerings. “Model-driven development is about generating code, and using that code as the basis for an application,“ he said.

Telelogic, among other companies, also uses the phase “requirements-driven development” in its marketing literature. The concept is tightly interwoven with, and “extremely complementary” to, model-driven development, Carillo said. “The State diagram brings requirements to life,” he said, referring to one of 15 diagram types included in the UML.

Forrester’s Schwaber said she wasn’t so sure that requirements-driven development is a practice in its own right. “What is it?” she wondered.

Model- and test-driven development are essentially a way of expressing best practices, said Koders CEO Darren Rush. That is why the company adopted the term “search-driven development” to characterize its offerings, which let developers search existing codebases for components and other artifacts they can reuse in new applications (see “Now, Search Gets Behind the Wheel,” below).

In the end, one “driven” approach isn’t necessarily any better than another, said Forrester’s Hammond. It’s about identifying the core organizing principle of that particular development approach.

But there is also “a lot of marketing going on,” he said. “What are we going to see next—customer-driven development?”


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