Application Development Open Source Strategy with an Architecture-centric Approach Today's software developer, like never before, is blessed with a plethora of sophisticated open source tools and technologies to aid his craft in producing market-worthy applications.  Leveraging these resources together with the developer's business domain knowledge and agile best practices can quickly yield some truly amazing results  To sustain these successes, an application developer must apply an architectural-centric approach in order to realize longevity, flexibility and independence in his application.

Feature-driven development (FDD) has the more traditional progression of a systems-engineering life cycle mode as compared to agile methods. It uses distinct phases in its iterations while still being highly iterative and collaborative. FDD does conduct up-front planning, design and documentation and relies very heavily upon domain modeling.

In his article "Data Crunching Tips and Techniques," Greg Wilson taught us how to translate legacy data into XML. In the second half, he explains how to merge new data into an existing database. Developers will always face these types of data crunching problems, and knowing the standard data crunching tools can save you a lot of time. Greg also shares the basic knowledge about relational databases that every developer should possess.

Part II of II - Seven Additional Practices For Enterprise Agility

In part I of this Article, we noted that the benefits of agile software methods, including faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer needs and higher quality are undeniable to those who have mastered these practices. However, these practices have been developed and refined in circumstances characterized by small, co-located teams with ready access to a customer. Can enterprises building applications that require hundreds of distributed team members benefit from these practices, or are they forever doomed to large, late, stage-gate and waterfall-like results?