Greenfield projects

Greenfield projects

 Projects that involve building on a framework or a set of existing components

The third type of software project can be considered neither evolutionary nor new development. This type of project, which is becoming increasingly common, starts with a framework, or involves plugging together several components that are already developed and provide significant functionality.

A framework is a software system especially designed to be reused in different projects, or in the various products of a product line. A framework contains important functionality, but must be adapted to handle the requirements of particular customers or products.

For example, imagine an application framework for ticketing. Such a system would have basic capabilities for reserving and printing tickets for events or travel. These functions would be well designed and tested by the original developers of the framework. However, many details would need to be added to handle the particular needs of each new organization that adopts the framework. Selling tickets for a theater can be quite different from selling tickets for a sporting event, a tropical holiday package or even a cinema.

As an example of the use of components, imagine you had an accounting package and a package for tracking meetings, appointments etc. You might hook these together to create a product for a lawyer’s office. The meetings and appointments would automatically result in charges for time being recorded in the accounting package. The code that you write to connect the two component packages is called glue.

The use of frameworks or components allows you to benefit from reusing software that has been shown to be reliable. Yet, at the same time, it gives you much of the freedom to innovate that you would have if you were performing greenfield development

we will discuss frameworks in detail. We will also present a framework that you will use in exercises and projects throughout this book.