Agile Software

Development
 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.
 Agile manifesto
 We are finding 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
Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan
 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.
 The principles of agile methods
Principle Description
Customer involvement Customers should be closely involved throughout the
development process. Their role is to 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.
 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.
 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 characterizes agile methods.
 Prioritizing changes can be difficult where there are
multiple stakeholders.
 Maintaining simplicity requires extra work.
 It is difficult for organizations to move to a working
model in which processes are informal and defined
by development teams.
 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?
 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.
 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
 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.
 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.
 Extreme programming
 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 and agile principles
 Incremental development
 supported through small, frequent system
releases.
 People not process
 Pair programming, collective ownership and a
process that avoids long working hours.
 Customer involvement means full-time customer
engagement with the team.
 Change
 supported through regular system releases.
 Maintaining simplicity
 through constant refactoring of code.
The extreme programming release cycle
 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’.

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.

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.
 Extreme programming practices (b)
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
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.
 A ‘prescribing medication’ story
 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.
 A ‘prescribing medication’ story
 If she chooses ‘formulary’, the system displays a search box for
the approved formulary. She can then search for the drug
required. She selects a drug and is asked to check that the
medication is correct. She enters the dose and then confirms
the prescription.
 The system always checks that the dose is within the approved
range. If it isn’t, Kate is asked to change the dose. After Kate
has confirmed the prescription, it will be displayed for checking.
She either clicks ‘OK’ or ‘Change’. If she clicks ‘OK’, the
prescription is recorded on the database. If she clicks on
‘Change’, she reenters the ‘Prescribing medication’ process.
Examples of task cards for prescribing
medication
 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 constantly expected.
 Rather, it proposes constant code improvement
(refactoring) to make changes easier when they have
to be implemented.
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.
 Code Refactoring
extern int array_a[]; int calc_average_of_four(int* array) {
extern int array_b[]; int sum = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++)
int sum_a = 0; sum += array[i];

for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++) return sum / 4;

sum_a += array_a[i]; }

int average_a = sum_a / 4;

extern int array1[];
int sum_b = 0;
extern int array2[];
for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++)
int average1 = calcAverage(array1);
sum_b += array_b[i];
int average2 = calcAverage(array2);
int average_b = sum_b / 4;
 Examples of refactoring
 Renaming attributes and methods to make them
easier to understand.
 Duplicate code
 Same code structure at more than one places
 Extract method and invoke the code from both
places
 Low coupling and high cohesion

No dependencies Loosely coupled Highly coupled

some dependencies many dependencies
 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 are used to run all component
tests each time that a new release is built.
 Test-first development
 Writing tests before code clarifies the requirements to
be implemented.
 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 when new
functionality is added, thus checking that the new
functionality has not introduced errors.
 Person class
//methods
public class Person {
public String getName() {
// fields
return name;
private String name; // name of the person
}
private int maximumBooks; // most books the
public void setName(String anyName) {
person can check out
name = anyName;
// constructors
}
public Person() {
public int getMaximumBooks() {
name = "unknown name";
maximumBooks = 3; return maximumBooks;
} }
} public void setMaximumBooks(int
maximumBooks) {
this.maximumBooks = maximumBooks;
}
}
 Test Case
import junit.framework.TestCase;
public class PersonTest extends TestCase {
public void testPerson() {
Person p1 = new Person();
assertEquals("unknown name", p1.getName());
assertEquals(3, p1.getMaximumBooks());
}
public void testSetName() {
Person p2 = new Person();
p2.setName("Fred");
assertEquals("Fred", p2.getName());
}
public void testSetMaximumBooks() {
Person p3 = new Person();
p3.setMaximumBooks(10);
assertEquals(10, p3.getMaximumBooks());
}
}
 Test – Dose checking
 Input:
 1. A number in mg representing a single dose of the drug.
 2. A number representing the number of single doses per day.
 Tests:
 1. Test for inputs where the single dose is too high and too low.
 2. Test for inputs where the single dose is correct but the
frequency is too high.
 3. Test for inputs where the single dose × frequency is too high
and too low.
 4. Test for inputs where single dose × frequency is in the
permitted range.
 Output:
 OK or error message indicating that the dose is outside the safe
range.
 Pair programming
 In pair programming, programmers sit together at the
same workstation to develop the software.
 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.
 Pairs are created dynamically so that all team
members work with each other during the
development process.
 Pair programming
 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.
 Agile project management
 The principal responsibility of software project
managers
 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.
 Scrum
 The Scrum approach is a general agile method that
focus is on managing iterative development.
 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 user
manuals and assesses the lessons learned from
the project.
 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

Sprints—consist of work units that are

required to achieve a requirement defined
in the backlog

list of work to be done on the project.

 Scrum roles
 Product owner
 ensures that the team delivers value to the business. The
Product Owner writes customer-centric items (typically user
stories), ranks and prioritizes them, and adds them to
the product backlog.
 Scrum master
 protects the development team from external distractions.
 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.
 Development team
 Consists of 3 to 9 software engineers from cross functional area
 Include architects, programmers, analysts, QA experts, testers,
and UI designers.
 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.
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 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.
 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.
 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.
 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.
 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.