Nowadays, Agile software development is very popular, many new methodologies were created, and more are coming. TDD, FDD, Crystal series, Scrum, XP, ICONIX... What a shame to say that we are using waterfall process, the evil.

Bug Driven Development, a.k.a. BDD, is one of the most innovative methodologies. It is so simple, that any orgnization can adopt it immediately without any training. Extreme low management overhead, flat learning curve, no obsolete document, well tracking... And most important, BDD is very flexible, it fits any type, any size of projects.

Roles in BDD

Product Owner: no matter what kind of title one has, acts as Chief Justice in the whole development process. If there is any question about a filed bug, Product Owner's responsibility is to make final decision.

BDD Master: Monitor development progress, most of the time, bugs status. To make sure deadline will be met.

Team: The only responsibility is to fix bug.

Other stake holders: Anyone who is interesting in creating bugs, and has access to bug tracking system. The main responsibility of the group of people is to create new bug.

Process Model

1. Project inception

Entry criteria: Project has been approved, Product Owner and BDD Master has been named.

Tasks:

• Set a deadline
• Define descriptive requirements: deliver a perfect product that can satisfy all stake holders

Exit criteria: Deadline has been sent out by email

2. Project execution

Entry criteria: Team established

Tasks:

• Create bug
• Fix bug

Exit criteria: deadline arrived

3. Project close

Entry criteria: deadline arrived or everyone tired

Tasks:

• Give a spanking to those guys who did not fix all bugs
• Summerize how to improve engineering practices

Exit criteria: summary done and new project starting

Tools

• Bug tracking system: Bug Zilla, TD, JIRA, ClearCase DDTS, Fogz bug tracking system or any tool that can customize workflow to remove 'duplicate', 'by design' status
• Email: Anything not tracked by bug tracking system should be tracked by email

Tips

• Requirements elicitation and analysis are not needed. Customers' and stake holders' requirements are keep changing. Anything makes you unhappy, please file a bug
• The development process is totally incremental, any revision with few complaints, can be released.