What Does Business-Driven Development Mean?
Business-driven development (BDD) is a methodology in which IT solutions are developed to directly meet the requirements of businesses. Business-driven development is accomplished by implementing a model-driven approach, which starts off with the business strategy, demands and objectives. These are then transformed into an IT solution. This transformation is often gained through the use of model transformations.
Business-driven development is a new Agile methodology and it helps developers, testers and business analysts share a common language, which is attained by means of specifications with examples, through a good focus on business requirements.
A BDD approach helps to increase business agility and align and prioritize IT initiatives with business imperatives. It also indirectly helps to simplify the cost justification process for IT budgets inside an organization.
Techopedia Explains Business-Driven Development
One of the inherent problems in today’s enterprise software development process is an inability to keep up with the pace at which businesses must change in response to emerging trends. In order for enterprise IT departments to survive, they must align themselves with emerging business demands. IT departments are increasingly being expected to engineer solutions that addresses one or more business process problems, rather than concentrating on creating solutions that are IT-centric.
Most IT departments spend a major share of their budget in enhancing and maintaining their existing applications. As the business leapfrogs with the latest process enhancements, the inflexible existing applications may not be capable of honoring the necessary changes. In such a scenario, a need for a new mechanism that aligns the IT department’s efforts with business demands and business strategy has emerged. BDD facilitates this via a framework that is well understood, standardized, and can be carried out effectively and repeatedly.
The first step is to create a business process model (BPM) and measure it through key performance indicators (KPI), return on investment (ROI), or other metrics. Then, the enterprise can use these BPMs as a crucial mechanism to communicate the business requirements to the IT realm.
