Chapter 3 – Agile Software Development

Chapter 3 Agile software development 1

Topics covered

Agile methods

Plan-driven and agile development

Extreme programming

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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

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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 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 and 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 that characterises agile methods.
 Prioritising 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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Technical, human, organizational issues

 Most projects include elements of plan-driven and agile

processes. Deciding on the balance depends on:
▪ Is it important to have a very detailed specification and design
before moving to implementation? If so, you probably need to use
a plan-driven approach.
▪ Is an incremental delivery strategy, where you deliver the software
to customers and get rapid feedback from them, realistic? If so,
consider using agile methods.
▪ How large is the system that is being developed? Agile methods
are most effective when the system can be developed with a small
co-located team who can communicate informally. This may not be
possible for large systems that require larger development teams
so a plan-driven approach may have to be used.

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Technical, human, organizational issues

▪ What type of system is being developed?

• Plan-driven approaches may be required for systems that require a lot
of analysis before implementation (e.g. real-time system with complex
timing requirements).
▪ What is the expected system lifetime?
• Long-lifetime systems may require more design documentation to
communicate the original intentions of the system developers to the
support team.
▪ What technologies are available to support system development?
• Agile methods rely on good tools to keep track of an evolving design
▪ How is the development team organized?
• If the development team is distributed or if part of the development is
being outsourced, then you may need to develop design documents to
communicate across the development teams.

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Technical, human, organizational issues

▪ Are there cultural or organizational issues that may affect the

system development?
• Traditional engineering organizations have a culture of plan-based
development, as this is the norm in engineering.
▪ How good are the designers and programmers in the
development team?
• It is sometimes argued that agile methods require higher skill levels
than plan-based approaches in which programmers simply translate
a detailed design into code
▪ Is the system subject to external regulation?
• If a system has to be approved by an external regulator (e.g. the
FAA approve software that is critical to the operation of an aircraft)
then you will probably be required to produce detailed
documentation as part of the system safety case.

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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, are supported 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

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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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

Chapter 3 Agile software development 21

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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Key points

 Agile methods are incremental development methods that focus on

rapid development, frequent releases of the software, reducing
process overheads and producing high-quality code. They involve
the customer directly in the development process.
 The decision on whether to use an agile or a plan-driven approach
to development should depend on the type of software being
developed, the capabilities of the development team and the culture
of the company developing the system.
 Extreme programming is a well-known agile method that integrates
a range of good programming practices such as frequent releases of
the software, continuous software improvement and customer
participation in the development team.

Chapter 3 Agile software development 24

References

 Sommerville, I., Software Engineering, 11th Edition,

Addison Wesley, 2018.

 Pressman, R. S., Software Engineering - A Practitioner's

Approach, 9th Edition, McGraw-Hill, 2020.

Chapter 1 Introduction 25