Chapter 3 – Agile Software Development

Lecture 1

Chapter 3 Agile software development 1

Topics covered

 Agile methods
 Plan-driven and agile development
 Extreme programming
 Agile project management
 Scaling agile methods

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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
 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. Chapter 3 Agile software development 4
Agile manifesto

 We are uncovering better ways of developing software

by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work
we have come to value:
 Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
 That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we
value the items on the left more.

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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 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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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.

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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.

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Chapter 3 – Agile Software Development

Lecture 2

Chapter 3 Agile software development 27

Testing in XP

 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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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.
 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.

Chapter 3 Agile software development 29

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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Test automation

 Test automation means that tests are written as

executable components before the task is implemented
 These testing components should be stand-alone, should
simulate the submission of input to be tested and should check
that the result meets the output specification. An automated test
framework (e.g. Junit) is a system that makes it easy to write
executable tests and submit a set of tests for execution.
 As testing is automated, there is always a set of tests
that can be quickly and easily executed
 Whenever any functionality is added to the system, the tests can
be run and problems that the new code has introduced can be
caught immediately.

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XP testing difficulties

 Programmers prefer programming to testing and

sometimes they take short cuts when writing tests. For
example, they may write incomplete tests that do not
check for all possible exceptions that may occur.
 Some tests can be very difficult to write incrementally.
For example, in a complex user interface, it is often
difficult to write unit tests for the code that implements
the ‘display logic’ and workflow between screens.
 It difficult to judge the completeness of a set of tests.
Although you may have a lot of system tests, your test
set may not provide complete coverage.

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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.

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Pair programming

 In 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 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 evidence that 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.
 Individuals are not held responsible for problems with the code.
Instead, the team has collective responsibility for resolving these
problems.
 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.
 Where pair programming and collective ownership are used,
others benefit immediately from the refactoring so they are likely
to support the process.
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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
particular strengths of agile methods.

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Scrum

 The Scrum approach is a general agile method but its

focus is 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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The Scrum process

Chapter 3 Agile software development 39

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 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 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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Teamwork in Scrum

 The ‘Scrum master’ is 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.
 The whole team attends short daily meetings where all
team members share information, describe their
progress since the last meeting, problems that have
arisen and what is planned for the following day.
 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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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

 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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Large systems development

 Large systems are usually collections of separate,

communicating systems, where separate teams develop each
system. Frequently, these teams are working in different
places, sometimes in different time zones.
 Large systems are ‘brownfield systems’, that is they include
and interact with a number of existing systems. Many of the
system requirements are concerned with this interaction and
so don’t really lend themselves to flexibility and incremental
development.
 Where several systems are integrated to create a system, a
significant fraction of the development is concerned with
system configuration rather than original code development.

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Large system development

 Large systems and their development processes are

often constrained by external rules and regulations
limiting the way that they can be developed.
 Large systems have a long procurement and
development time. It is difficult to maintain coherent
teams who know about the system over that period as,
inevitably, people move on to other jobs and projects.
 Large systems usually have a diverse set of
stakeholders. It is practically impossible to involve all of
these different stakeholders in the development process.

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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 essential to maintain
agile fundamentals
 Flexible planning, frequent system releases, continuous
integration, test-driven development and good team
communications.

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Scaling up to large systems

 For large systems development, it is not possible to focus only

on the code of the system. You need to do more up-front
design and system documentation
 Cross-team communication mechanisms have to be designed
and used. This should involve regular phone and video
conferences between team members and frequent, short
electronic meetings where teams update each other on
progress.
 Continuous integration, where the whole system is built every
time any developer checks in a change, is practically
impossible. However, it is essential to maintain frequent
system builds and regular releases of the system.

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Scaling out to large companies

 Project managers who do not have experience of agile

methods may be reluctant to accept the risk of a new approach.
 Large organizations often have quality procedures and
standards that all projects are expected to follow and, because
of their bureaucratic nature, these are likely to be incompatible
with agile methods.
 Agile methods seem to work best when team members have a
relatively high skill level. However, within large organizations,
there are likely to be a wide range of skills and abilities.
 There may be cultural resistance to agile methods, especially in
those organizations that have a long history of using
conventional systems engineering processes.
Chapter 3 Agile software development 49
Key points

 A particular strength of extreme programming is the

development of automated tests before a program
feature is created. All tests must successfully execute
when an increment is integrated into a system.
 The Scrum method is an agile method that provides a
project management framework. It is centred round a set
of sprints, which are fixed time periods when a system
increment is developed.
 Scaling agile methods for large systems is difficult. Large
systems need up-front design and some documentation.

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