Chapter 3 – Agile Software Development

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Topics covered

 Agile methods
 Agile development techniques
 Agile project management
 Scaling agile methods

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Rapid software development

 Rapid development and delivery is now often the most

important requirement for software systems
 Businesses operate in a fast
 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.
 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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Agile development

 Program specification, design and implementation are

inter-leaved
 The system is developed as a series of versions or
increments with stakeholders involved in version
specification and evaluation
 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 and 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.
 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.

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 Agile methods

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Agile 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.

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Agile manifesto

 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.

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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 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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Extreme programming

 A very influential agile method, developed in the late

1990s, that introduced a range of agile development
techniques including XP, scrum, Kanban, crystal, lean,
etc.
 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.

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Extreme programming practices

Principle or practice

Incremental planning
Small releases
Simple design
Refactoring
Pair programming
Collective ownership
On-site customer. Customer is part of user
stories
Testing is central to XP and XP has developed an
approach where the program is tested after every
change has been made.

etc

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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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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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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 using testing frameworks such
as Junit.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Scrum

 Scrum is an agile method that focuses on managing

iterative development rather than specific agile practices.
 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 terminology (a)

Scrum term Definition

Development team A self-organizing group of software developers, which should be no more

than 7 people.

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 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. He or she is
responsible for interfacing with the rest of the company and for ensuring
that the Scrum team is not diverted by outside interference. The Scrum
developers are adamant that the ScrumMaster should not be thought of
as a project manager. Others, however, may not always find it easy to
see the difference.

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. Understanding a team’s velocity helps them estimate
what can be covered in a sprint and provides a basis for measuring
improving performance.

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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.
 During this stage the team is isolated from the customer
and the organization, with all communications channelled
through the so-called ‘Scrum master’.

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Teamwork in Scrum

 The ‘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.
 The whole team attends short daily meetings (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.
 This means that everyone on the team knows what is going on
and, if problems arise, can re-plan short-term work to cope with
them.

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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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Distributed Scrum

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 Scaling agile methods

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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.

 Scaling up agile methods involves changing these to

cope with larger, longer projects where there are multiple
development teams, perhaps working in different
locations.

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Scaling out and scaling up

 ‘Scaling up’ is concerned with using agile methods for

developing large software systems that cannot be
developed by a small team.
 ‘Scaling out’ is concerned with how agile methods can be
introduced across a large organization with many years
of software development experience.

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Agile methods and software maintenance

 Most organizations spend more on maintaining existing

software than they do on new software development. So,
if agile methods are to be successful, they have to
support maintenance as well as original development.
 Two key issues:
 Are systems that are developed using an agile approach
maintainable, given the emphasis in the development process of
minimizing formal documentation?
 Can agile methods be used effectively for evolving a system in
response to customer change requests?

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Agile maintenance

 Key problems are:

 Lack of product documentation
 Keeping customers involved in the development process
 Maintaining the continuity of the development team

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