Lecture 3

Agile Software Development

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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 –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.
 Rapid software development
 Specification, design and implementation are inter-leaved
 System is developed as a series of versions with stakeholders
involved in version evaluation
 User interfaces are often developed using an IDE and graphical
toolset.

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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
 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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The principles of agile methods
Principle Description
Customers should be closely involved throughout the
Customer development process. Their role is provide and prioritize
involvement new system requirements and to evaluate the iterations
of the system.
The software is developed in increments with the
Incremental
customer specifying the requirements to be included in
delivery
each increment.
The skills of the development team should be recognized
People not process and exploited. Team members should be left to develop
their own ways of working without prescriptive processes.

Expect the system requirements to change and so design

Embrace change
the system to accommodate these changes.
Focus on simplicity in both the software being developed
Maintain simplicity and in the development process. Wherever possible,
actively work to eliminate complexity from the system.

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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.

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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?
 Problems may arise if original development team cannot
be maintained.

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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.
 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.

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Plan-driven and agile specification

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Extreme Programming
 Perhaps the best-known and most widely used 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.

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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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The extreme programming release cycle

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Extreme programming practices (a)

Principle or practice Description

Requirements are recorded on story cards and the stories

Incremental to be included in a release are determined by the time
planning available and their relative priority. The developers break
these stories into development ‘Tasks’.
The minimal useful set of functionality that provides
business value is developed first. Releases of the system
Small releases
are frequent and incrementally add functionality to the first
release.
Enough design is carried out to meet the current
Simple design
requirements and no more.
An automated unit test framework is used to write tests for
Test-first
a new piece of functionality before that functionality itself is
development
implemented.
All developers are expected to refactor the code
Refactoring continuously as soon as possible code improvements are
found. This keeps the code simple and maintainable.
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Extreme programming practices (b)
Developers work in pairs, checking each other’s work and
Pair programming
providing the support to always do a good job.
The pairs of developers work on all areas of the system, so
Collective that no islands of expertise develop and all the developers
ownership take responsibility for all of the code. Anyone can change
anything.
As soon as the work on a task is complete, it is integrated
Continuous
into the whole system. After any such integration, all the
integration
unit tests in the system must pass.
Large amounts of overtime are not considered acceptable
Sustainable pace as the net effect is often to reduce code quality and
medium term productivity
A representative of the end-user of the system (the
customer) should be available full time for the use of the
On-site customer XP team. In an XP 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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Requirements scenarios
 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 scenarios or user
stories.
 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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XP and change
 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.

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Refactoring
 Programming team 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 requires
architecture refactoring and this is much more
expensive.
 Examples: Re-organization of a class hierarchy to
remove duplicate code, Tidying up and renaming
attributes and methods to make them easier to
understand.
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Any Questions??

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Don’t waste your time looking back on what
you’ve lost.

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