WEEK # 5

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
DR. SYED ATIF ALI SHAH

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

AIR UNIVERSITY, ISLAMABAD.
[email protected]
Topics covered
• What is Agility
• Agile Process
• Agile methods
• Plan-driven and agile 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
– Critical systems?
– Software has to evolve quickly to reflect changing 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

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Rapid software development – fundamental
characteristics/ Agile Process
• Specification, design and implementation are inter-leaved
– no detailed system specification, and design documentation is
minimized
– user requirements document only define important characteristics
of the system
• System is developed as a series of versions with stakeholders
involved in version evaluation
– propose changes to the software and new requirements that should
be implemented in a later version of the system
• User interfaces are often developed using an IDE and graphical
toolset. Dr. Syed Atif Ali Shah 4
Rapid Software Development
• Agile methods are incremental development methods
– increments are small and new releases of the system are created
and made available to customers every two or three weeks
• Involve customers in the development process
– get rapid feedback on changing requirements
• Minimize documentation
– By using informal communications rather than formal meetings with
written documents

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What is Agility
• Effective response to change
– software being built, changes to the team members, changes
because of new technology,
• Changes of all kinds that may have an impact on the product
or on project
• Agility
– Encourages team structures and attitudes that make
communication
– Rapid delivery of operational software
– Deemphasizes the importance of intermediate work products
– Adopts the customer as a part of the development team

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What is Agility
• Agility can be applied to any software process by meeting
following criteria
– The process be designed in a way that allows the project team to
adapt tasks and to streamline them
– Conduct planning in a way that understands the fluidity of an agile
development approach
– Eliminate all but the most essential work products and keep them
lean
– Emphasize an incremental delivery strategy that gets working
software to the customer as rapidly as feasible

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 The principles of agile methods
Principle Description
Customer Customers should be closely involved throughout the development
involveme process. Their role is provide and prioritize new system
nt requirements and to evaluate the iterations of the system.
Increment The software is developed in increments with the customer
al delivery specifying the requirements to be included in each increment.
People The skills of the development team should be recognized and
not exploited. Team members should be left to develop their own ways
process of working without prescriptive processes.
Embrace Expect the system requirements to change and so design the
change system to accommodate these changes.
Maintain Focus on simplicity in both the software being developed and in
simplicity the development process. Wherever possible, actively work to
eliminate complexity from
Dr. Syed the system.
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Agile method applicability
• Product development where a software company is developing
a small or medium-sized product for sale.
• Custom system development within an organization
– where there is a clear commitment from the customer to become
involved in the development process
– 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.

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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
• Prioritizing changes can be difficult where there are multiple
stakeholders.
• Contracts may be a problem as with other approaches to iterative
development.
– As requirement document is part of contract between customer and
supplier
• Organizations have spent year in formalizing their process, so it is
difficult for them to adopt informal process model defined by
development 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?
– Key to implementing maintainable software is to produce high quality and well-structured code
instead of documentation
– Can agile methods be used effectively for evolving a system in response to
customer change requests?
• Incremental delivery, design for change and maintaining simplicity all make sense when
software is being changed which shows agile methods are used effectively
• Problems may arise if original development team is broken up.
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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
– 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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Agile vs. Plan-driven Methods
Agile methods Plan-driven methods

Low criticality High criticality

Senior developers Junior developers(?)

Requirements change often Requirements do not change often

Small number of developers Large number of developers

Culture that responds to change Culture that demands order

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Agile Methods
• Well-known agile software development
methods and/or process frameworks include:
–Extreme programming (XP)
–Scrum
–Dynamic systems development method (DSDM)
–Agile Modeling
–Agile Unified Process (AUP)

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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.
– Requirements are based on simple customer stories or scenarios
• Customer involvement means full-time customer engagement with
the team.
– Responsible for defining acceptance tests for the system
• 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 [1/2]
Principle or Description
practice
Incremental Requirements are recorded on story cards and the stories to be included in a
planning release are determined by the time available and their relative priority. The
developers break these stories into development ‘Tasks’.

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 An automated unit test framework is used to write tests for a new piece of
development 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 [2/2]
Pair Developers work in pairs, checking each other’s work and
programming providing the support to always do a good job.

Collective The pairs of developers work on all areas of the system, so

ownership that no islands of expertise develop and all the developers
take responsibility for all of the code. Anyone can change
anything.
Continuous As soon as the work on a task is complete, it is integrated into
integration the whole system. After any such integration, all the unit tests
in the system must pass.

Sustainable Large amounts of overtime are not considered acceptable as

pace the net effect is often to reduce code quality and medium term
productivity
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The extreme programming release cycle

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Extreme programming

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Planning
• 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
• 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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Design
• Provides implementation guidance for a story as it is written
• XP encourages the use of CRC (class-responsibility-
collaborator) cards
– Identify and organize the object oriented classes that are relevant to
the current software increment
• If a difficult design problem is encountered
– Immediately creation of an operational prototype of that portion of
the design called Spike
– Intent is to lower risk when true implementation starts
• Encourage refactoring
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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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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.
– Eclipse include tools for refactoring which simplify the process of
finding dependencies between code sections and making global
code modifications
• In principle, software is easy to understand and change as
new stories are implemented
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Coding
• After creating simple design team move to
developing tests instead of coding
–Develops unit test; the developer is better able
to focus on what must be implemented to pass
the test
• A key concept during the coding activity is
pair programming
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Pair programming
• Programmers sit together at the same workstation 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 between pairs reduces the overall risks to a
project when team members leave.
• A pair working together is more efficient than 2 programmers working
separately.

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Advantages of pair programming
• It supports the idea of collective ownership and
responsibility for the system.
• It acts as an informal review process because
each line of code is looked at by at least two
people.
• It helps support refactoring, which is a process of
software improvement.
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 Testing in XP
• XP testing features:
–Test-first development.
–Incremental test development from scenarios.
–User involvement in test development and
validation.
–Automated test are used to run all component
tests each time that a new release is built.
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Test-first development
• Writing tests before code clarifies the requirements to be
implemented.
– Ambiguities have to clarify before actual implementation
• Tests are written as programs 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.
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Scrum
• The Scrum approach is a general agile method but its focus is
on managing iterative development
• There are three phases in Scrum.
– 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 user manuals and assesses the lessons learned from the
project.

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The Scrum process

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Planning and Architecture Design
• Planning includes
– Definition of the system being developed
– Definition of the project team, tools, risk assessment
– Requirements are prioritized and effort is estimated
– Product Backlog list
• Containing all requirements that are currently known
• Updated regularly with new and more detailed items
– At every iteration, the updated product Backlog is reviewed by the Scrum Team
• Architecture Design
– High level design of the system including architecture is planned based on
current items in Product Backlog
– Design review meeting is held to go over the proposals for the implementation

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The Sprint cycle
• Sprints are fixed length, normally 2–4 weeks. They correspond
to the development of a release of the system in XP.
• The Assess Phase
– Product backlog is reviewed, and priorities and risks are assigned
– Customer is involved to introduce new requirements or tasks at
beginning of each sprint
• The Selection Phase
– Involves all of the project team who work with the customer to
select the features and functionality to be developed during the
sprint.
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The Sprint cycle
• The Develop Phase
– The team organize themselves to develop the software.
– The team is isolated from the customer and the organization
– All communication is channelled through the so-called ‘Scrum
master’.
– The role of the Scrum master is to protect the development team
from external distractions.
• The Review Phase
– 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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Teamwork in Scrum
• The whole team attends short daily meetings
– What did you do since the last team meeting?
– What obstacles are you encountering?
– What do you plan to accomplish by the next team meeting?
• 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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Roles and Responsibilities
• Scrum Master (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.
• Product Owner
– Responsible for project, managing, controlling and making visible Product
Backlog list
– Makes final decisions of the tasks related to product Backlog
• Scrum Team
– It is project team
– Organize itself in order to achieve the goals of each Sprint
– Involved in effort estimation, creating Sprint Backlog, reviewing Product
Backlog list
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Roles and Responsibilities
• Customer
–Participate in tasks related to product Backlog items
• Management
–In charge of final decision making
–Participate in setting of goals and requirements
–E.g. management is involved in selecting Product
Owner
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Scrum benefits
• Rising and Janoff (2000) discuss its advantages as follows
– The product is broken down into a set of manageable and
understandable chunks.
– 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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THANK YOU
DR. SYED ATIF ALI SHAH
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
AIR UNIVERSITY, ISLAMABAD.
[email protected]

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