The DSDM Consortium has contributed four important business-facing roles to the Eclipse Process Framework project through the Eclipse Composer ‘plug-in’ mechanism. Elements of DSDM can now be incorporated into a project to add the business focus essential for success in a fast-moving, Agile development environment. Instead of being led just by IT, projects that use DSDM roles can now more easily be driven by business needs.

Eclipse is a substantial open source foundation set up to facilitate software development that has brought together a wide range of partners from the IT industry. One of its products is the Eclipse Process Framework, built with contributions from IBM, Cap Gemini, Xansa and many others.  It includes a Composer tool for generating development processes. Open UP Basic (Open Unified Process Basic) is a new open source process based on IBM’s Rational Unified Process for small projects, and DSDM has contributed four business-facing roles.
 
“There will never be a development process that fits every situation,” says architecture and methods specialist Mark Dickson, who has been responsible for building the DSDM plug-in. “The key to unlocking better performance in projects is to encourage different development processes to work together. Using Eclipse Process Framework, all processes are described according to the same set of rules, which makes it easier to connect them together. DSDM’s contribution to Open UP Basic can be added into a development process simply by loading some software.”
 
Business-facing roles contributed from DSDM are Executive Sponsor, Visionary, Ambassador User and Advisor User. An Executive Sponsor is a high-level user who will champion the project and is ultimately the owner of the system being developed. A Visionary is a user committed to the project and its business goals, who will ensure that objectives are being met. An Ambassador User comes from the business and ensures that the system being built is the right one to meet requirements. An Advisor User brings day-to-day knowledge of the job being carried out into the project. Without these four roles, many projects face difficulties.
“There was a concern that Eclipse users might find themselves letting projects be led by IT”, says Barry Fazackerley, DSDM Consortium Chairman. “The purpose of these DSDM roles is to ensure that projects are business-led, and they will now be accessible to any user of the Eclipse toolkit.
 
DSDM Roles can be added to Eclipse Process Framework as an Eclipse Composer ‘plug-in’. There are plans to make further elements of DSDM more widely available using this mechanism in the near future.

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