Agile Development

Common Fears for Developers

• The project will produce the wrong product.
• The project will produce a product of inferior
quality.
• The project will be late.
• We’ll have to work 80 hour weeks.
• We’ll have to break commitments.
• We won’t be having fun.
 What is “Agility”?
• Effective (rapid and adaptive) response to change
• Effective communication among all stakeholders
• Drawing the customer onto the team
• Organizing a team so that it is in control of the work
performed

Yielding …

• Rapid, incremental delivery of software

 An Agile Process
• Is driven by customer descriptions of what is required
(scenarios)
• Recognizes that plans are short-lived
• Develops software iteratively with a heavy emphasis
on construction activities
• Delivers multiple ‘software increments’
• Adapts as changes occur
 Principles of agile methods
Principle Description
Customer involvement The customer should be closely involved throughout the
development process. Their role is provide and prioritise
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 recognised
and exploited. The team should be left to develop their own
ways of working without prescriptive processes.
Embrace change Expect the system requirements to change and design the
system so that it can accommodate these changes.
Maintain simplicity Focus on simplicity in both the software being developed
and in the development process used. Wherever possible,
actively work to eliminate complexity from the system.
 Agile process models
• Extreme Programming (XP)
• Scrum
• Adaptive Software Development
• Dynamic System Development Method (DSDM)
• Crystal
• Feature Driven Development
• Agile Modeling (AM)
 Extreme Programming (XP)
• 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.
• XP Values
– Communication
– Simplicity
– Feedback
– Courage
– Respect
Extreme Programming (XP)
 Extreme Programming (XP)
• XP Planning
– Begins with the creation of user stories
– Agile team assesses each story and assigns a cost
– Stories are grouped to for a deliverable increment
– A commitment is made on delivery date
– After the first increment project velocity is used to help
define subsequent delivery dates for other increments
 Extreme Programming (XP)
• XP Design
– Follows the KIS (keep it simple) principle
– Encourage the use of CRC (class-responsibility-
cards) cards
– For difficult design problems, suggests the
creation of spike solutions — a design prototype
– Encourages refactoring — an iterative
refinement of the internal program design
• XP Coding
– Recommends the construction of a unit test for
a store before coding commences
– Encourages pair programming
 Extreme Programming (XP)
• XP Testing
– All unit tests are executed daily
– Acceptance tests are defined by the customer and
executed to assess customer visible functionality
 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.
 Customer involvement
• Customer involvement is a key part of XP where
the customer is part of the development team.
• The role of the customer is:
– To help develop stories that define the requirements
– To help prioritize the features to be implemented in
each release
– To help develop acceptance tests which assess
whether or not the system meets its requirements.
 Requirements scenarios

• In XP, 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.
 Story card for document
downloading
Downloading and printing an artic le

First, you se le ct the a rticle that you want from a displayed list. You
then have to tell the system how you will pay for it - this c an either
be through a subscription, thr ough a company acc ount or by c redit
ca rd.
Afte r this, you ge t a copyright form from the syste m to fill in and,
when you have submitted this, the artic le you wa nt is downloaded
onto your computer.
You then choose a printer and a copy of the artic le is printed. You
te ll the syste m if printing ha s bee n suc cessful.

If the article is a print-only a rticle, you ca nÕt kee p the P DF version

so it is automatically deleted from your compute r .
 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.
 Refactoring
• Refactoring is the process of code improvement where
code is reorganised and rewritten to make it more
efficient, easier to understand, etc.
• Refactoring is required because frequent releases mean
that code is developed incrementally and therefore tends
to become messy.
• Refactoring should not change the functionality of the
system.
• Automated testing simplifies refactoring as you can see if
the changed code still runs the tests successfully.
 Testing in XP
• 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.
 Task cards for document
downloading

Tas k 1: Imple ment principal work flow

Tas k 2: Imple ment artic le c atalog and s e le ction

Tas k 3: Imple ment payme nt colle ction

P ayment may be made in 3 dif fere nt ways. The use r

selects which way the y wish to pay. If the user
ha s a libra ry subsc ription, then the y c an input the
subscribe r ke y whic h should be c hec ked by the
system. Alternative ly, they ca n input an or ga nisa tiona l
ac count number. If this is va lid, a debit of the c ost
of the a rticle is poste d to this a ccount. Fina lly , they
may input a 16 digit cr edit card number and expiry
da te. This should be che cke d for va lidity and, if
va lid a debit is posted to that cre dit card ac count.
 Test case description

Te st 4:Te st cre dit card validity

Input:
Astring representing thecredit card numberand two integers representing
the month and ye ar when the ca rd e xpires
Te sts :
Che ck tha t all bytes in the string a re digits
Che ck tha t the month lies betwe en 1 a nd 12 and the
ye ar is greater than or equal to the current ye ar.
Using the first 4 digits of the cre dit card number ,
check that the ca rd issuer is valid by looking up the
ca rd issuer table . Chec k c redit car d validity by submitting the card
number a nd expiry da te information to the c ard
issue r
Output:
OK or error message indicating tha t the ca rd is invalid
 Test-first 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.
• All previous and new tests are automatically run
when new functionality is added. Thus checking
that the new functionality has not introduced
errors.
 Pair programming
• In XP, programmers work in pairs, sitting together to
develop code.
• 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 this.
• Measurements suggest that development productivity
with pair programming is similar to that of two people
working independently.
 Problems with XP
• Customer involvement
– This is perhaps the most difficult problem. It may be difficult or
impossible to find a customer who can represent all stakeholders
and who can be taken off their normal work to become part of
the XP team. For generic products, there is no ‘customer’ - the
marketing team may not be typical of real customers.
• Architectural design
– The incremental style of development can mean that
inappropriate architectural decisions are made at an
early stage of the process.
– Problems with these may not become clear until
many features have been implemented and
refactoring the architecture is very expensive.
• Test complacency
– It is easy for a team to believe that because it has
many tests, the system is properly tested.
– Because of the automated testing approach, there is
a tendency to develop tests that are easy to automate
rather than tests that are ‘good’ tests.
 Key points
• Extreme programming includes practices such as
systematic testing, continuous improvement and
customer involvement.
• Customers are involved in developing requirements
which are expressed as simple scenarios.
• The approach to testing in XP is a particular strength
where executable tests are developed before the code is
written.
• Key problems with XP include difficulties of getting
representative customers and problems of architectural
design.