Database Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 15
Team Development
Team Development is an excellent tool for managing APEX software development.
Team Development is embedded within the APEX development environment, allowing
you to manage your APEX projects with tools that you and your team use every day,
like interactive reports. This eliminates the need for an external project-management
tool. Team Development's simple, extensible, and flexible architecture is ideal for man-
aging projects of any size. Its simplicity lends itself to small projects where you want to
minimize your project-management overhead. Its extensibility scales well, allowing you
to manage large projects by using its rich set of attributes to construct a sophisticated
work breakdown structure (WBS). Its flexibility lets you adapt it to your organization's
software development culture.
APEX and Team Development are both well suited to work with agile software de-
velopment methodologies. APEX's Rapid Application Development (RAD) architec-
ture allows the team to rapidly deliver regularly scheduled releases to the business test-
ers and end users. Team Development's feedback mechanism efficiently channels end-
user issues back to the development team so that appropriate changes can be included in
the following releases and easily documented. Team Development makes APEX, which
is already an efficient development platform, even more efficient.
The primary purpose of this chapter is to highlight how Team Development works. A
secondary purpose is to illustrate how agile software development practices can be used
with Team Development to deliver quality software while meeting your cost and sched-
ule constraints. By the end of the chapter, you should have a good understanding of what
is in Team Development and some ideas about how you integrate it into your team's de-
velopment culture.
Team Development was added to APEX in version 4.0. The APEX team has used a
version of Team Development while developing APEX, even before it was released as
