Oracle Custom Development Method (CDM) is a set of well-defined custom development processes which can be managed in several ways to guide through a custom development project. A CDM project defines how all internal, external, and timesensitive business events are handed, and ties each event to how the business and system processes need to respond. CDM is founded on the CASE Method Approach, makes sure that business needs are clearly defined at the outset and remain visible throughout the development process.

CDM projects are conducted in phases. These phases provide quality and control checkpoints to coordinate project activities that have a common goal. During a project phase, a project team will simultaneously be executing tasks from several processes.

The overall organization of CDM is expressed by a process-based systems development methodology. Every full life-cycle custom development project involves most if not all of the following processes, whether they are the responsibility of the development team, the users, the IS staff, a third party, or a combination. Most processes overlap in time with others, and are interrelated through common deliverables. A few processes are strict predecessors of each other, such as Transition and Post-System Support.

Processes and phases in Oracle CDM are shown on the next figure.

Processes and phases of Oracle CDM

Although it has been developed with moderate- and large-sized projects in mind, CDM is directly applicable to smaller projects as well. CDM is most effective in projects that use Oracle’s relational database technology and the Oracle Repository.

Like the other Oracle methods, CDM lays out the tasks and deliverables that should be included in any full life-cycle development project. CDM assigns tasks to processes based on common techniques, skills or dependencies. The tasks within these processes are then assigned to a phase. The end of a phase reflects the completion of a major set of objectives and milestones in a custom development effort.