Chapter 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.
 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 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

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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
 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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 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.

 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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The extreme programming release cycle

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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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 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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 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
 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

 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.

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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.
 XP testing features:
 Test-first development.
 Incremental test development from scenarios.
 User involvement in test development and validation.
 Automated test harnesses are used to run all component
tests each time that a new release is built.

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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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 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 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. 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 should be
product increment ‘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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Scrum sprint cycle

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 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.

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 The Sprint cycle

 Once these are agreed, the team organize themselves to

develop the software.
 During this stage the team is isolated from the customer and
the organization, with all communications channelled through
the so-called ‘Scrum master’.
 The role of the Scrum master is to protect the development
team from external distractions.
 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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 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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 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.

 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.
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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.
 When scaling agile methods it is important to maintain agile
fundamentals:
 Flexible planning, frequent system releases, continuous integration,
test-driven development and good team communications.

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 Practical problems with agile methods

 The informality of agile development is incompatible with the

legal approach to contract definition that is commonly used in
large companies.
 Agile methods are most appropriate for new software
development rather than software maintenance. Yet the
majority of software costs in large companies come from
maintaining their existing software systems.
 Agile methods are designed for small co-located teams yet
much software development now involves worldwide
distributed teams.

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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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 Agile maintenance

 Key problems are:

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

 Agile development relies on the development team knowing

and understanding what has to be done.

 For long-lifetime systems, this is a real problem as the original

developers will not always work on the system.

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