Agile Software Engineering & Development

Lecture Agenda –
▪ What is and Why we need Agile Methods?
▪ Agile Manifesto – Principle for Agile Methods
▪ Agile vs Plan-driven Approaches
▪ Types of Agile Methods
▪ Extreme Programming (XP)
▪ Software Change in XP
▪ Testing in XP
▪ Pair Programming
▪ Agile Project Management – Scrum
▪ Scaling Agile Methods
▪ Recap
Learning Outcome

Objectives

Contents
Learning Outcome

Tools & Advanced Topics in SE

Advanced SE
Tools & Technologies Ethics for SE
Change Plan
Change Management & Evolution
Software Testing & Evaluation Test Plan

Design & Architecture Evaluation

Engineering
Activities Software Design & Architecture SDS

Software Modeling UML 2.0

SRS
Software Requirements Engineering
Software Project Management
Project Plan
Process & Project Process Models Agility in Processes
Introduction to SE
 What is Agile Development?
Agile = light & adaptive. Early 90s saw the inception of ‘Agile Methods’
Plan-driven Process Models are vital for the development of larger scale and properly
formulated projects, however; such models are time-cost-resource intensive.

▪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.

▪Process represents what needs to be done?

▪Activities represents how this is done?
Image Source: http://www.slideshare.net/kinetickitty/ss-36536632
▪
 Agile Manifesto – Why we need Agile Methods…?
 The philosophy behind agile methods is reflected in the agile
manifesto that was agreed on by many of the leading developers of
these methods.

 We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping

others do it. Through this work we have come to value: Ph
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Vie iloso
Im w a phic
pli nd al
• Working software over comprehensive documentation ca
tio its
ns
• 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.
 Agile Manifesto
Principle Description
Customer Customers should be closely involved throughout the development process. Their role is provide and
involvement 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.

Customer Customers should be closely involved throughout the development process. Their role is provide and
involvement prioritize new system requirements and to evaluate the iterations of the system.
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. (Incremental Development Process)
▪ User interfaces are often developed using an IDE and graphical toolset.
(Software Prototyping)
Agile Methodology – When to go Agile?

▪ 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.

Benefits & Limitations of Agile Methods?

Chapter 3 Agile software development 9

Recap: Plan-driven vs Agile Process

Plan-driven Process Agile-driven Process

Requirements
Requirements Design
Design

Implementation
Implementation
According to a predefined (fixed) plan
According to the context (changing) Situation

▪ In practice, most practical processes include elements of both plan-driven and agile approaches.
▪ There are no right or wrong software processes!
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.

Chapter 3 Agile software development 11

Types of Agile Methods
▪ Extreme Programming (XP)
▪ Pair Programming
▪ Scrum
▪ Adaptive Software Development
▪…
Group Activity: List and Describe other Agile Methods
Agile Method I – Extreme Programming (XP)
▪ Perhaps the best-known and most widely used agile method.
▪ Extreme Programming (XP) takes an ‘extreme’ approach to
iterative development (several new versions by different developers in same day).
▪ 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 Release Cycle

Select User Stories Break down Stories

Plan Release
for this Release to Task

‘I want to be able to customise - Resources, Time, Efforts to

- User Authentication
my transaction view (based on implement tasks
- Customised Transaction View
daily, weekly, monthly and yearly)
activities’

- Functionality & Quality - Deployment & Configuration - Development/Coding

- Acceptance Test - Unit and Integration Test

Develop/Integrate/
Evaluate System Release Software Test Software
 XP Practices
Principle or Description
practice
Incremental Requirements are recorded on story cards and the stories to be included in a release are determined
planning by the time available and their relative priority. The developers break these stories into development
‘Tasks’. Discussed later.
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 functionality before that
development 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.
 XP Practices
Principle or Description
practice
Pair programming Developers work in pairs, checking each other’s work and providing the support to always
do a good job.
Collective The pairs of developers work on all areas of the system, so that no islands of expertise
ownership 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 the whole system. After any
integration 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.
Requirements Scenario
 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.
 Example Story – Medication Prescription
Story title User Story
Prescribing Medication
Kate is a doctor who wishes to prescribe medication for a patient attending a clinic.

The patient record is already displayed on her computer so she clicks on the medication field
and can select current medication’, ‘new medication’ or ‘formulary’. If she selects ‘current
medication’, the system asks her to check the dose. If she wants to change the dose, she enters
the dose and then confirms the prescription.

If she chooses ‘new medication’, the system assumes that she knows which medication to
prescribe. She types the first few letters of the drug name. The system displays a list of possible
drugs starting with these letters.

She chooses the required medication and the system responds by asking her to check that the
medication
selected is correct. She enters the dose and then confirms the prescription.

Story Card
Example - Task Cards for Prescribing Medication
XP and Software 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.
 Code 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.
Public void SelectMedication(String newMed) Public String SelectMedication(String newMed, String extMed)
{ {
------ return (medType)
} }
Refactoring Examples
▪ 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.
▪…

Chapter 3 Agile software development 22

Agile Methods II
- Testing in XP
- Pair Programming
- Scrum
- Scalability of Agile Methods
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 testing is used to run all component tests each time that
a new release is built.
Test Case Description for Dose Checking
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 26

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.
Chapter 3 Agile software development 27
 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.
Chapter 3 Agile software development 28
Pair Programming
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.

Chapter 3 Agile software development 30

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.

Chapter 3 Agile software development 31

 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.

Chapter 3 Agile software development 32

Time for some testing…
(no pairing now!)
Agile Project Management
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.

Chapter 3 Agile software development 35

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.

Chapter 3 Agile software development 36

The Scrum Process

Chapter 3 Agile software development 37

 Scrum Process … Outline
• Start with Vision of what you want to achieve.
• Come up with Core Requirements and priorities (Bare Minimum but good enough to get started) – Product
Backlog

38
• Team selects the requirements that it can implement in the first iteration (Planning Meeting)
• Team defines tasks for completing requirements (Sprint Backlog)
• Team goes in 30-Day Development Cycle (Sprint)
• Team meets daily to sync up on progress (Daily Scrum)
• Team goes through the complete process (design, development, testing, documentation) to complete an
increment of functionality.
• At the end of 30 day sprint, Team demonstrates completed functionality to bosses and stakeholders (Sprint
Review)
• Team analyses its Sprint performance (Sprint Retrospective)
• Requirements are prioritized, redefined.
• Team goes through the process again (Sprint 2, Sprint 3, …, Release)
Scrum Process – Visually

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.

Chapter 3 Agile software development 40

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.

Chapter 3 Agile software development 41

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.

Chapter 3 Agile software development 42

 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.

Chapter 3 Agile software development 43

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.

Chapter 3 Agile software development 44