Agile Software Development

Reference: Sommerville, Software Engineering, 10 ed., Chapter 3

The big picture

Rapid development and delivery is now often the most important requirement for software
systems. Businesses operate in a fast-changing requirement and it is practically impossible to
produce a set of stable software requirements. Software has to evolve quickly to reflect changing
business needs.
Agile development methods emerged in the late 1990s whose aim was to radically reduce the
delivery time for working software systems:

 Program specification, design, and implementation are interleaved

 The system is developed as a series of frequent versions or increments
 Stakeholders involved in version specification and evaluation
 Extensive tool support (e.g. automated testing tools) used to support development
 Minimal documentation - focus on working code

Plan-based vs agile development

Plan-driven development
A plan-driven approach to software engineering is based around separate development
stages with the outputs to be produced at each of these stages planned in advance. Not
 necessarily waterfall model: plan-driven, incremental development is possible. Iteration
occurs within activities.
Agile development
Specification, design, implementation and testing are inter-leaved and the outputs from
the development process are decided through a process of negotiation during the
software development process.
Most projects include elements of plan-driven and agile processes. Deciding on the balance
depends on many technical, human, and organizational issues.

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.

 Are based on an iterative approach to software development.
 Are intended to deliver working software quickly and evolve this 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.
Manifesto for Agile Software Development:
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

 Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

 Working software over comprehensive documentation
 Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
 Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
The principles of agile methods:
Customer involvement
Customers should be closely involved throughout the development process. Their role is
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.
Agile method applicability:
  Product development where a software company is developing a small or medium-
sized product.
 Custom system development within an organization, where there is a
clear commitment from the customer to become involved in the development
process and where there are not a lot of external rules and regulations that affect the
software.
 Because of their focus on small, tightly-integrated teams, there are problems in
scaling agile methods to large systems.

Problems with agile methods:

 It can be difficult to keep the interest of customers who are involved in the process.
 Team members may be unsuited to the intense involvement that characterizes agile
methods.
 Prioritizing changes can be difficult where there are multiple stakeholders.
 Maintaining simplicity requires extra work.
 Contracts may be a problem as with other approaches to iterative development.

Extreme programming
Perhaps the best-known and a very influential agile method, Extreme Programming (XP) takes an
'extreme' approach to iterative development:

 New versions may be built several times per day;

 Increments are delivered to customers every 2 weeks;
 All tests must be run for every build and the build is only accepted if tests run
successfully.

This is how XP supports 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.
Influential XP practices
Extreme programming has a technical focus and is not easy to integrate with management
practice in most organizations. Consequently, while agile development uses practices from XP,
the method as originally defined is not widely used.
Key practices of XP include:
User stories for specification
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.
Refactoring
Conventional wisdom in software engineering is to design for change. It is worth spending
time and effort anticipating changes as this reduces costs later in the life cycle. XP,
however, maintains that this is not worthwhile as changes cannot be reliably anticipated.
Rather, it proposes constant code improvement (refactoring) to make changes easier
when they have to be implemented. Programming teams look 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.
Test-first development
Testing is central to XP and XP has developed an approach where the program is tested
after every change has been made.
Test-driven development: writing tests before code clarifies the requirements to be
implemented. Tests are written as programs rather than data so that they can be
executed automatically. The test includes a check that it has executed correctly (usually
relies on a testing framework such as Junit). All previous and new tests are run
automatically when new functionality is added, thus checking that the new functionality
has not introduced errors.
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.
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 one
person. It encourages refactoring as the whole team can benefit from improving the
system code. 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 two
programmers working separately.
Scrum
The Scrum approach is a general agile method but its focus is on managing iterative
development rather than specific agile practices. There are three phases in Scrum:
 1. The initial phase is an outline planning phase where you establish the general
objectives for the project and design the software architecture.
2. This is followed by a series of sprint cycles, where each cycle develops an increment
of the system.
3. 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.

Sprints are fixed length, normally 2-4 weeks. They correspond to the development of a release of
the system in XP. 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 (product owner) to select the features and functionality to be developed
during the sprint. Once these are agreed, the team organize themselves to develop the software.
During this stage the team is relatively isolated from the product owner and the organization,
with all communications channelled through the ScrumMaster. The role of the ScrumMaster is
to protect the development team from external distractions. At the end of the sprint the work
done is reviewed and presented to stakeholders (including the product owner). Velocity is
calculated during the sprint review; it provides an estimate of how much product backlog the
team can cover in a single sprint. Understanding the team's velocity helps them estimate what
can be covered in a sprint and provides a basis for measuring and improving performance. The
next sprint cycle then begins.

The ScrumMaster is a facilitator who arranges short daily meetings (daily scrums), tracks the
backlog of work to be done, records decisions, measures progress against the backlog and
communicates with the product owner and management outside of the team. The whole team
attends daily scrums where all team members share information, describe their progress since
the last meeting, problems that have arisen and what is planned for the following day.
Advantages of scrum include:

 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.

Scaling agile methods

Agile methods have proved to be successful for small and medium sized projects that can
be developed by a small co-located team. It is sometimes argued that the success of these
methods comes because of improved communications which is possible when everyone is
working together. Scaling up agile methods involves changing these to cope with larger, longer
projects where there are multiple development teams, perhaps working in different locations.
Two perspectives on scaling of agile methods:
'Scaling up'
Using agile methods for developing large software systems that cannot be developed by a
small team. For large systems development, it is not possible to focus only on the code of
the system; you need to do more up-front design and system documentation. Cross-team
communication mechanisms have to be designed and used, which should involve regular
phone and video conferences between team members and frequent, short electronic
meetings where teams update each other on progress. Continuous integration, where the
whole system is built every time any developer checks in a change, is practically
impossible; however, it is essential to maintain frequent system builds and regular
releases of the system.
'Scaling out'
How agile methods can be introduced across a large organization with many years of
software development experience. Project managers who do not have experience of agile
methods may be reluctant to accept the risk of a new approach. Large organizations often
have quality procedures and standards that all projects are expected to follow and,
because of their bureaucratic nature, these are likely to be incompatible with agile
methods. Agile methods seem to work best when team members have a relatively high
skill level. However, within large organizations, there are likely to be a wide range of skills
and abilities. There may be cultural resistance to agile methods, especially in those
organizations that have a long history of using conventional systems engineering
processes.