Agile Software Development

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Chapter Outline

• Agile methods
• Plan-driven and agile development
• Agile development techniques
• Agile project management

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Rapid Software Development

❖ Businesses operate in a global, rapidly changing environment.

❖ Software has to evolve quickly to reflect changing business needs.
❖ Plan-driven development is essential for some types of system but
does not meet these business needs.
❖ Rapid software development processes are designed to produce
useful software quickly. The software is not developed as a single unit
but as a series of increments, with each increment including new
system functionality
❖ Agile development methods emerged in the late 1990s whose aim was
to radically reduce the delivery time for working software systems

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Fundamentals of Rapid Software Development

❏ Program specification, design and implementation are interleaved,

no detailed system specification, and design documentation is
minimized
❏ The system is developed as a series of versions or increments with
stakeholders involved in version specification and evaluation
❏ System user interfaces are often developed using an interactive
development system that allows the interface design to be quickly
created by drawing and placing icons on the interface
❏ Frequent delivery of new versions for evaluation
❏ Extensive tool support (e.g. automated testing tools) used to support
development.
❏ Minimal documentation – focus on working code
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Plan-driven Vs Agile development

❑ Plan-driven development
▪ A plan-driven approach is based around separate development stages with
the outputs to be produced at each of these stages planned in advance.
▪ Iteration occurs within activities with formal documents used to
communicate between stages of the process.
▪ Good for safety-critical systems
❑ Agile development
▪ The software development approach based on iterative development
where specification, design, implementation and testing are interleaved.
▪ Good for fast moving business environment
▪ May include a documentation ‘spike’, where, instead of producing a new
version of a system, the team produces system documentation

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Plan-driven Vs Agile development

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Agile Methods

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Agile Methods

❑ Dissatisfaction with the overheads involved in software design

methods of the 1980s and 1990s led to the creation of agile
methods. These methods:
▪ Focus on the code rather than the design
▪ Based on an iterative approach to software development
▪ Aims to deliver and evolve working software quickly to meet changing
requirements.
❑ The aim of agile methods is to reduce overheads in the
software process (e.g. by limiting documentation) and to be
able to respond quickly to changing requirements without
excessive rework.

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The Principles of Agile Methods

Principle Description
Customer involvement Customers should be closely involved throughout the development
process. Their role is to provide and prioritize new system
requirements and to evaluate the iterations of the system.

Incremental delivery The software is developed in increments with the customer

specifying the requirements to be included in each increment.

People not process The skills of the development team should be recognized and
exploited. Team members should be left to develop their own ways
of working without prescriptive processes.
Embrace change Expect the system requirements to change and so design the system
to accommodate these changes.
Maintain simplicity Focus on simplicity in both the software being developed and in
the development process. Wherever possible, actively work to
eliminate complexity from the system.
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Agile Development Techniques

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Agile Methods

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Extreme Programming (XP)

❑ Emphasizes on values such as Communication, Simplicity,

Feedback, Courage and Respect, and prioritizes customer
satisfaction over everything else.

❑ The approach was developed by pushing recognized good practices,

such as iterative development, to ‘extreme’ levels.
• For example: in XP, several new versions of a system may be developed by
different programmers, integrated and tested in a day

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Extreme Programming (XP)
❑ Extreme Programming (XP) takes an ‘extreme’ approach to iterative
development.
▪ Requirements are expressed as scenarios (called user stories)
▪ Stories are implemented directly as a series of tasks;
▪ Programmers develop tests for each task before writing the code.
▪ All tests must be successfully executed when new code is integrated into the
system

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The XP Release Cycle

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The Extreme Programming Process

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The Extreme Programming Process
✧ Exploration
▪ The customers write out the story cards
▪ Project team familiarize themselves with the tools and technology
▪ Takes between a few weeks to a few months

✧ Iterations to release phase

▪ Includes several iterations of the systems before the first release
▪ Each take one to four weeks to implement
▪ The first iteration creates a system with the architecture of the whole
system
▪ Customer decides the stories to be selected for each iteration

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The Extreme Programming Process
✧ Productionizing phase
▪ Requires extra testing and checking
▪ New changes may still be found
▪ The iterations may need to be quickened
▪ The postponed ideas and suggestions are documented for later
implementation, e.g., the maintenance phase.
✧ Death phase
▪ When the customer no longer have any stories to be implemented.
▪ System satisfies customer needs
▪ Necessary documentation of the system is finally written
▪ Death may also occur if the system is not delivering the desired
outcomes, or if it becomes too expensive for further development
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XP and Agile Principles

✧ Incremental development is supported through small, frequent

system releases.
✧ Customer involvement means full-time customer engagement
with the team.
✧ People not process through pair programming, collective
ownership and a process that avoids long working hours.
✧ Change supported through regular system releases.
✧ Maintaining simplicity through constant refactoring of code.

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Extreme Programming Practices (a)
Principle or practice Description
Incremental planning Requirements are recorded on story cards and the stories to be included
in a release are determined by the time available and their relative
priority. The developers break these stories into development ‘Tasks’.
See Figures 3.5 and 3.6.

Small releases The minimal useful set of functionality that provides business value is
developed first. Releases of the system are frequent and incrementally
add functionality to the first release.

Simple design Enough design is carried out to meet the current requirements and no
more.
Test-first development An automated unit test framework is used to write tests for a new piece
of functionality before that functionality itself is implemented.

Refactoring All developers are expected to refactor the code continuously as soon
as possible code improvements are found. This keeps the code simple
and maintainable.

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Extreme programming practices (b)

Pair programming Developers work in pairs, checking each other’s work and providing
the support to always do a good job.
Collective ownership The pairs of developers work on all areas of the system, so that no
islands of expertise develop and all the developers take responsibility
for all of the code. Anyone can change anything.
Continuous integration As soon as the work on a task is complete, it is integrated into the
whole system. After any such integration, all the unit tests in the
system must pass.
Sustainable pace Large amounts of overtime are not considered acceptable as the net
effect is often to reduce code quality and medium term productivity

On-site customer A representative of the end-user of the system (the customer) should be
available full time for the use of the XP team. In an extreme
programming process, the customer is a member of the development
team and is responsible for bringing system requirements to the team
for implementation.
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Key Practices in XP

❖ Extreme programming has a technical focus and is not easy to

integrate with management practice in most organizations.

❖ Key practices
User stories for specification
Refactoring
Test-first development
Pair programming

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User stories for requirements

• In XP, a customer or user is part of the XP team and is

responsible for making decisions on requirements.
• User requirements are expressed as user stories or scenarios.
• These are written on cards and the development team break
them down into implementation tasks. These tasks are the
basis of schedule and cost estimates.
• The customer chooses the stories for inclusion in the next
release based on their priorities and the schedule estimates.

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A ‘prescribing medication’ story

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Examples of task cards for prescribing
medication

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Refactoring
✧ Incremental development tends to degrade the software structure, so changes to the software
become harder to implement
▪ code is often duplicated
▪ parts of the software are reused in inappropriate ways
▪ overall structure degrades as code is added to the system
✧ Refactoring is the process of restructuring code, while not changing its original functionality
yet improves its internal structure.
✧ The goal of refactoring is to improve internal code by making many small changes without
altering the code's external behavior.
✧ When carried out manually, refactoring is applied directly to the source code and is generally
a labor-intensive, ad hoc, and potentially error-prone process.
✧ Program development environments, such as Eclipse (Carlson, 2005), include tools for
refactoring which simplify the process of finding dependencies between code sections and
making global code modifications

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Benefits of Refactoring

▪ Programming team looks for possible software improvements and make

these improvements even where there is no immediate need for them.
▪ This improves the understandability of the software and so reduces the
need for documentation.
▪ Changes are easier to make because the code is well-structured and clear.

▪ However, some changes require architecture refactoring and this is much

more expensive.

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Examples of Refactoring

Re-organization of a class hierarchy to remove duplicate code.

Tidying up and renaming attributes and methods to make them easier to
understand.
The replacement of inline code with calls to methods that have been
included in a program library.

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Testing with XP

✧ Testing is central to XP and XP has developed an approach

where the program is tested after every change has been made.

✧ XP testing features:
▪ Test-first development.
▪ Incremental test development from scenarios.
▪ Customer involvement in test development and validation.
▪ Use of automated testing frameworks

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 Customer Involvement
✧ The role of the customer in the testing process is to help develop
acceptance tests for the stories that are to be implemented in the next
release of the system.
✧ The customer who is part of the team writes tests as development
proceeds. All new code is therefore validated to ensure that it is what
the customer needs.
✧ However, people adopting the customer role have limited time
available and so cannot work full-time with the development team.
They may feel that providing the requirements was enough of a
contribution and so may be reluctant to get involved in the testing
process.

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Test case description for dose checking

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 Test automation
✧ Test automation means that tests are written as executable
components before the task is implemented
▪ These testing components should be stand-alone, should simulate the
submission of input to be tested and should check that the result meets
the output specification. An automated test framework (e.g. Junit) is a
system that makes it easy to write executable tests and submit a set of
tests for execution.
✧ As testing is automated, there is always a set of tests that can
be quickly and easily executed
▪ Whenever any functionality is added to the system, the tests can be run
and problems that the new code has introduced can be caught
immediately.

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 Problems with test-first development

✧ Programmers prefer programming to testing and sometimes

they take shortcuts when writing tests. For example, they may
write incomplete tests that do not check for all possible
exceptions that may occur.
✧ Some tests can be very difficult to write incrementally. For
example, in a complex user interface, it is often difficult to
write unit tests for the code that implements the ‘display logic’
and workflow between screens.
✧ It difficult to judge the completeness of a set of tests. Although
you may have a lot of system tests, your test set may not
provide complete coverage.

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 Pair programming
✧ Pair programming involves programmers working in pairs,
developing code together.
✧ This helps develop common ownership of code and spreads
knowledge across the team.
✧ It serves as an informal review process as each line of code is
looked at by more than 1 person.
✧ It encourages refactoring as the whole team can benefit from
improving the system code.

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 Pair programming
✧ In pair programming, programmers sit together at the same
computer to develop the software.
✧ Pairs are created dynamically so that all team members work
with each other during the development process.
✧ The sharing of knowledge that happens during pair
programming is very important as it reduces the overall risks
to a project when team members leave.
✧ Pair programming is not necessarily inefficient and there is
some evidence that suggests that a pair working together is
more efficient than 2 programmers working separately.

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Agile project management

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Agile Project Management

• The principal responsibility of software project managers is to

manage the project so that the software is delivered on time and
within the planned budget for the project.

• The standard approach to project management is plan-driven.

Managers draw up a plan for the project showing what should be
delivered, when it should be delivered and who will work on the
development of the project deliverables.

• Agile project management requires a different approach, which is

adapted to incremental development and the practices used in agile
methods.
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Scrum

❖ Scrum is an agile method that focuses on managing iterative

development rather than specific technical approaches to agile
software engineering.

❖ There are three phases in Scrum.

▪ The initial phase is an outline planning phase where you establish the
general objectives for the project and design the software architecture.
▪ This is followed by a series of sprint cycles, where each cycle develops
an increment of the system.
▪ The project closure phase wraps up the project, completes required
documentation such as system help frames and user manuals and
assesses the lessons learned from the project.
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Scrum

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Scrum Process

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Pre-game

✧ The pre-game phase includes two sub-phases:

1. Planning and
2. Architecture/High level design
 Planning

❖ Definition of the system being developed.

❖ A Product Backlog list is created containing all the requirements that
are currently known.
❖ The requirements are prioritized and the effort needed for their
implementation is estimated.
❖ The Product Backlog list is constantly updated with new and more
detailed items, as well as with more accurate estimations and new
priority orders.
❖ Planning also includes the definition of the project team, tools and
other resources, risk assessment and controlling issues, training
needs and verification management approval.
❖ The customer is closely involved in this process and can introduce
new requirements or tasks at the beginning of each sprint
Architecture Design

❖ The high level design of the system including the architecture

is planned based on the current items in the Product Backlog.
❖ In case of an enhancement to an existing system, the changes
needed for implementing the Backlog items are identified
along with the problems they may cause.
❖ A design review meeting is held to go over the proposals for
the implementation and decisions are made on the basis of this
review.
Development phase (Game phase)

❖ This phase is treated as a "black box" where the unpredictable

is expected.
❖ The system is developed in Sprints
Sprint

❖ Sprints are iterative cycles where the functionality is

developed or enhanced to produce new increments.
❖ Each Sprint includes the traditional phases of software
development: requirements analysis, design, implementation,
evolution and delivery phases.
❖ One Sprint is planned to last from one week to one month.
The Scrum sprint cycle

❑ Sprints are fixed length, normally 2–4 weeks.

❑ The starting point for planning is the product backlog, which is the
list of work to be done on the project.
❑ The selection phase involves all of the project team who work with
the customer to select the features and functionality from the product
backlog to be developed during the sprint.
❑ Once these are agreed, the team organize themselves to develop the
software.

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The Sprint Cycle

❑ During this stage the team is isolated from the customer and the
organization, with all communications channelled through the
so-called ‘Scrum master’.
❑ ‘Scrum master’ is a facilitator who arranges daily meetings, tracks
the backlog of work to be done, records decisions, measures
progress against the backlog, and communicates with customers and
management outside of the team.
❑ At the end of the sprint, the work done is reviewed and presented to
stakeholders. The next sprint cycle then begins.

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Post-game

❖ This phase is entered when an agreement has been made that

the environmental variables such as the requirements are
completed.
❖ In this case, no more items and issues can be found nor can
any new ones be invented. The system is now ready for the
release and the preparation for this is done during the
post-game phase, including the tasks such as the integration,
system testing and documentation.
Scrum Terminology (a)

Scrum term Definition

Development team A self-organizing group of software developers, which should be no more than 7
people. They are responsible for developing the software and other essential
project documents.
Potentially shippable The software increment that is delivered from a sprint. The idea is that this
product increment should be ‘potentially shippable’ which means that it is in a finished state and
no further work, such as testing, is needed to incorporate it into the final
product. In practice, this is not always achievable.

Product backlog This is a list of ‘to do’ items which the Scrum team must tackle. They may be
feature definitions for the software, software requirements, user stories or
descriptions of supplementary tasks that are needed, such as architecture
definition or user documentation.

Product owner An individual (or possibly a small group) whose job is to identify product
features or requirements, prioritize these for development and continuously
review the product backlog to ensure that the project continues to meet critical
business needs. The Product Owner can be a customer but might also be a
product manager in a software company or other stakeholder representative.
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Scrum Terminology (b)

Scrum term Definition

Scrum meeting A daily meeting of the Scrum team that reviews progress and prioritizes
work to be done that day. Ideally, this should be a short face-to-face
meeting that includes the whole team.

ScrumMaster The ScrumMaster is responsible for ensuring that the Scrum process is
followed and guides the team in the effective use of Scrum

Sprint A development iteration. Sprints are usually 2-4 weeks long.

Velocity An estimate of how much product backlog effort that a team can cover in
a single sprint.

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Scrum Benefits

❖ The product is broken down into a set of manageable and

understandable chunks.
❖ Unstable requirements do not hold up progress.
❖ The whole team have visibility of everything and consequently
team communication is improved.
❖ Customers see on-time delivery of increments and gain
feedback on how the product works.
❖ Trust between customers and developers is established and a
positive culture is created in which everyone expects the
project to succeed.

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