Agile Software Development

Developing
(Unit 4B)

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 Developing - Introduction

 Practices that keep the code clean and allow the entire
team to contribute to development
 Incremental Requirements
 Customer Tests
 Test-Driven Development
 Refactoring
 Simple Design
 Incremental Design and Architecture
 Spike Solutions
 Performance Optimization
 Exploratory Testing

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 Practices that keep the code clean

 Incremental Requirements
 allows the team to get started while customers work out
requirements details.
 Customer Tests
 help communicate tricky domain rules.
 Test-Driven Development
 allows programmers to be confident that their code does what
they think it should.
 Refactoring
 Enables programmers to improve code quality without changing
its behavior.

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 Practices that keep the code clean -
Cond
 Simple Design
 Allows the design to change to support any feature request
 Incremental Design and Architecture
 Allows programmers to work on features in parallel with technical
infrastructure.
 Spike Solutions
 Use controlled experiments to provide information.
 Performance Optimization
 uses hard data to drive optimization efforts.
 Exploratory Testing
 enables testers to identify gaps in the team’s thought processes.
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 Incremental Requirements

 We define requirements in parallel with other work.

 A team using an up-front requirements phase keeps their
requirements in a requirements document.
 An XP team doesn’t have a requirements phase and
story cards aren’t miniature requirements documents, so
where do requirements come from?

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 Incremental Requirements – Contd

 The Living Requirements Document

 Work Incrementally

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 The Living Requirements Document

 In XP, the on-site customers sit with the team.

 They’re expected to have all the information about
requirements at their fingertips.
 When somebody needs to know something about the
requirements for the project, he/she asks one of the
on-site customers rather than looking in a document.
 The key to successful requirements analysis in XP is
expert customers.
 Involve real customers, an experienced product
manager, and experts in your problem domain

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 Work Incrementally

 Work on requirements incrementally, in parallel with the

rest of the team’s work
 Vision, features, and stories
• Start by clarifying your project vision, then identify features and
stories (Release Planning)
 Rough expectations
 Mock-ups, customer tests, and completion criteria
 Customer review
• Only working applications show customers what they’re really going
to get

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 Customer Tests

 Customers have specialized expertise, or domain

knowledge, that programmers don’t have.
 Some areas of the application - what programmers call
domain rules - require this expertise
 To create customer tests, follow these processes
 Describe,
 Demonstrate, and
 Develop

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 Customer Tests – Contd.

 Describe
 At the beginning of the iteration, look at your stories and decide
whether there are any aspects that programmers might
misunderstand.
 Customer tests are for communication, not for proving that the
software works.

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 Customer Tests – Contd.

 Demonstrate
 After a brief discussion of the rules, provide concrete examples
that illustrate the scenario.
 Tables are often the most natural way to describe this
information

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 Demonstrate (Using Tables)

Sent User OK to delete

N Account Rep Y

N CSR Y
N Manager Y
N Admin Y

Y Account Rep N
Y CSR N
Y Manager Audited
Y Admin Audited

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 Demonstrate (Using Tables) – Contd.

 As an example, invoice hasn’t been sent to customers,

so an Account Rep can delete it.
 In fact, anybody can delete it—CSRs, managers, and
admins.
 But once it’s sent, only managers and admins can delete
it, and even then it’s audited.

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 Customer Tests – Contd.

 Develop
 When you’ve covered enough ground, document your
discussion so the programmers can start working on
implementing your rules
 Programmers: Once they have some examples, can start
implementing the code using normal Test Driven Development
(TDD)
 Don’t use the customer tests as a substitute for writing your own
tests

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 Customer Tests – Contd.

 Focus on Business Rules

 Ask Customers to Lead
 Automating the Examples

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 Customer Tests – Contd.

 Focus on Business Rules

 To show that an account rep must not delete a mailed invoice,
you might make the mistake of writing this:
• Log in as an account rep
• Create new invoice
• Enter data
• Save invoice
• Email invoice to customer
• Check if invoice can be deleted (should be “no”)
 What happened to the core idea? It’s too hard to see
 Compare that to the previous approach:
Sent User OK to delete
Emailed Account Rep N

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 Customer Tests – Contd.

 Ask Customers to Lead

 Remember the “customer” in “customer tests”

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 Test-Driven Development

 We produce
 Well-designed,
 Well-tested, and
 Well-factored code in small, verifiable steps.

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 Test-Driven Development (TDD)

 It is a rapid cycle of testing, coding, and refactoring.

 When adding a feature, a pair may perform dozens of
these cycles, implementing and refining the software in
baby steps until there is nothing left to add and nothing
left to take away.
 Research shows that TDD substantially reduces the
incidence of defects.
 When used properly, it also helps improve your design,
documents your public interfaces, and guards against
future mistakes.

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 Why TDD

 TDD applies a principle similar to the IDEs (Integrated

Development Environment) to programmer intent.
 Just as modern compilers provide more feedback on the
syntax of your code, TDD cranks up the feedback on the
execution of your code.
 Every few minutes—as often as every 20 or 30 seconds
—TDD verifies that the code does what you think it
should do.
 If something goes wrong, there are only a few lines of
code to check. Mistakes are easy to find and fix.

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 Why TDD – Contd.

 TDD uses an approach similar to double-entry

bookkeeping.
 You communicate your intentions twice, stating the same
idea in different ways:
 First with a test.
 Then, with production code.
 When they match, it’s likely they were both coded
correctly.
 If they don’t, there’s a mistake somewhere.

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 How to Use TDD

 Every few minutes, TDD provides proven code that has

been tested, designed, and coded.
 To use TDD, follow the “red, green, refactor” cycle.

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 The TDD cycle

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 Understand the Red Green Refactor
Methodology
 The Red, Green, Refactor method consists of three phases:

 Red - write a test that fails.

 Green - implement the test-supporting functionality to pass the test.

 Refactor - improve the production code AND the tests to absolute perfection.

 The Red, Green, Refactor cycle should be as short as possible.

 The main objective of this method is to advance in small increments .

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 TDD – Step 1: Think

 TDD uses small tests to force you to write your code—

you only write enough code to make the tests pass.
 Imagine what behavior you want your code to have,
 Then think of a small increment that will require fewer than five
lines of code.
 Next, think of a test—also a few lines of code—that will fail
unless that behavior is present.
 In other words, think of a test that will force you to add
the next few lines of production code.
 This is the hardest part of TDD.

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 TDD – Step 2: Red bar

 Now write the test.

 Write only enough code for the current increment of behavior—
typically fewer than five lines of code.
 Code in terms of the class’ behavior and its public interface, not
how you think you will implement the internals of the class.
Respect encapsulation.
 In the first few tests, this often means you write your test to use
method and class names that don’t exist yet.
 After the test is coded, run your entire suite of tests and
watch the new test fail.
 In most TDD testing tools, this will result in a red
progress bar.
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 TDD – Step 3: Green bar

 Next, write just enough production code to get the test to

pass.

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 TDD - Step 4: Refactor

 With all your tests passing again, you can now refactor
without worrying about breaking anything.
 Review the code and look for possible improvements.
 Ask your navigator if he’s made any notes.

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 TDD - Step 5: Repeat

 When you’re ready to add new behavior, start the cycle

over again.
 The key to TDD is small increments.

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 TDD – Testing Tools

 To use TDD, you need a testing framework.

 The most popular are the open source xUnit tools
 JUnit (for Java) and NUnit (for .NET)

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 Refactoring

 Every day, our code is slightly better than it was the day
before.
 Refactoring is the process of changing the design of your
code without changing its behavior—
 what it does stays the same, but how it does it changes.
 Refactoring is also reversible.

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 Refactoring - Reflective Design

 Refactoring enables an approach to design, what is

called reflective design.
 In addition to creating a design and coding it, you can
now analyze the design of existing code and improve it.
 One of the best ways to identify improvements is with
code smells:
 condensed nuggets of wisdom that help you identify common
problems in design.
 A code smell doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a problem with
the design.
 It’s like a funky smell in the kitchen: it could indicate that it’s time
to take out the garbage.
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 Refactoring

 Analyzing Existing Code

 Reflective design requires that you understand the design of
existing code.
• The easiest way to do so is to ask someone else on the team.
• A conversation around a whiteboard design sketch is a great way to
learn.
 In some cases, no one on the team will understand the design,
or you may wish to dive into the code yourself.

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 Refactoring

 How to Refactor
 When you refactor, proceed in a series of small transformations.
 Each refactoring is like making a turn on a Rubik’s cube.
 To achieve anything significant, you have to string together
several individual refactorings, just as you have to string
together several turns to solve the cube.
 Refactoring isn’t rewriting.

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 Simple Design

 Design should be easy to modify and maintain.

 Appropriate for the intended audience
 It doesn’t matter how brilliant and elegant a piece of design is; if
the people who need to work with it don’t understand it, it isn’t
simple for them.
 Communicative
 Every idea that needs to be communicated is represented in the
system.
 Like words in a vocabulary, the elements of the system
communicate to future readers.

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 Simple Design – Contd.

 Factored
 Duplication of logic or structure makes code hard to understand
and modify.
 Minimal
 Within the above three constraints, the system should have the
fewest elements possible.
 Fewer elements means less to test, document, and
communicate.

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 Simple Design – Contd.

 Points to keep in mind as you strive for simplicity.

 You Aren’t Gonna Need It (YAGNI)
 Once and Only Once
 Self-Documenting Code
 Isolate Third-Party Components
 Limit Published Interfaces
 Fail Fast

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 Incremental Design and Architecture

 We deliver stories every week without compromising

design quality
 XP makes challenging demands of its programmers
 Every week, programmers should finish 4 to 10 customer-valued
stories.
 Your customers need you to deliver completed stories.
 XP provides a solution for this dilemma: Incremental
Design

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 Incremental Design

 It is also called Evolutionary Design

 It allows you to build technical infrastructure (such as
domain models and persistence frameworks)
incrementally, in small pieces, as you deliver stories.

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 Incremental Design and Architecture –
Contd.
 Continuous Design
 Incrementally Designing Methods
 Incrementally Designing Classes
 Incrementally Designing Architecture
 Risk-Driven Architecture

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 Continuous Design

 Incremental design initially creates every design element

 Method, class, namespace, or even architecture to solve a
specific problem.
 Additional customer requests guide the incremental
evolution of the design.
 No matter what level of design you’re looking at, the
design tends to improve in bursts.

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 Continuous Design

 You will implement code into the existing design for

several cycles, making minor changes as you go.
 Then something will give you an idea for a new design
approach, which will require a series of refactoring's to
support it.
 This is called a Breakthrough
 Breakthroughs happen at all levels of the design, from
methods to architectures
 Breakthroughs are the result of important insights and
lead to substantial improvements to the design.

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 Continuous Design - Breakthrough

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 Incrementally Designing Methods

 It’s test-driven development.

 While the driver implements, the navigator thinks about
the design.
 He looks for overly complex code and missing elements,
which he writes on his notecard.
 He thinks about which features the code should support
next, what design changes might be necessary, and
which tests may guide the code in the proper direction.

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 Incrementally Designing Classes

 When TDD is performed well, the design of individual

classes and methods is beautiful:
 they’re simple, elegant, and easy to use.
 This isn’t enough.
 Without attention to the interaction between classes, the
overall system design will be muddy and confusing.

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 Incrementally Designing Classes

 During TDD, the navigator should also consider the

wider scope.
 Ask these questions:
 Are there similarities between the code you’re implementing and
other code in the system?
 Are class responsibilities clearly defined and concepts clearly
represented?
 How well does this class interact with other classes?

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 Incrementally Designing Classes

 Class-level refactoring's happen several times per day.

 Depending on your design, breakthroughs may happen a
few times per week and can take several hours to
complete.
 Nonetheless, remember to proceed in small, test-verified
steps.
 Use your iteration slack to complete breakthrough
refactorings

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 Incrementally Designing Architecture

 Large programs use overarching organizational

structures called architecture.
 For example, many programs segregate user interface classes,
business logic classes, and persistence classes into their own
namespaces
 This is a classic three-layer architecture

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 Incrementally Designing Architecture

 You can also design architectures incrementally.

 As with other types of continuous design, use TDD and
pair programming as your primary vehicle.
 While your software grows, be conservative in
introducing new architectural patterns:
 Introduce just what you need to for the amount of code you have
and the features you support at the moment
 Breakthroughs in architecture happen every few months

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 Incrementally Designing Architecture

 Refactoring to support the breakthrough can take several

weeks or longer because of the amount of duplication
involved.
 Although changes to your architecture may be tedious,
they usually aren’t difficult once you’ve identified the new
architectural pattern
 Start by trying out the new pattern in just one part of your
design
 Keep delivering stories while you refactor

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 Risk-Driven Architecture

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 Risk-Driven Architecture

 Your power lies in your ability to choose which

refactorings to work on.
 Although it would be inappropriate to implement features
your customers haven’t asked for, you can direct your
refactoring efforts toward reducing risk.
 Anything that improves the current design is OK
 So, choose improvements that also reduce future risk.

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 Spike Solutions

 We perform small, isolated experiments when we need

more information
 XP values concrete data over speculation
 Whenever you’re faced with a question, don’t speculate
about the answer - conduct an experiment!
 Figure out how you can use real data to make progress
 That’s what spike solutions are for

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 Spike Solutions

 A spike solution, or spike, is a technical investigation.

 It’s a small experiment to research the answer to a
problem.
 For example, a programmer might not know whether Java
throws an exception on arithmetic overflow.
 A quick 10-minute spike will answer the question

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 Spike Solutions – Contd.

 The best way to implement a spike is usually to create a

small program or test that demonstrates the feature in
question
 Spike solutions clarify technical issues by setting aside
the complexities of production code

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 Scheduling Spikes

 You see a need to clarify a small technical issue, and

you write a quick spike to do so.
 If the spike takes more than a few minutes, your iteration slack
absorbs the cost.
 Sometimes you won’t be able to estimate a story at all
until you’ve done your research
 In this case, create a spike story and estimate that instead

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 Performance Optimization

 Modern computers are complex.

 Reading a single line of a file from a disk requires the
coordination of the CPU, the kernel, a virtual file system,
system bus, system memory, etc.
 There are so many variables it’s nearly impossible to
predict the general performance of any single method.

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 Performance Optimization

 The days in which a programmer could accurately

predict performance by counting instruction clock cycles
are long gone.
 A holistic approach is the only accurate way to optimize
such complex systems.
 Measure the performance of the entire system, make an
educated guess about what to change, then remeasure.
 If the performance gets better, keep the change.
 If it doesn’t, discard it.
 Once your performance test passes, stop - you’re done

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 Performance Optimization

 Use a profiler to guide your optimization efforts

 Find the bottlenecks, and focus your efforts on reducing them
 Although optimizations often make code more complex,
keep your code as clean and simple as possible.

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 When to Optimize

 Performance optimizations must serve the customer’s

needs
 Optimization has two major drawbacks:
 It often leads to complex, buggy code, and
 It takes time away from delivering features.
 Neither is in your customer’s interests.

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 When to Optimize

 Optimize only when it serves a real, measurable need.

 It means your priority should be code that’s clean and
elegant.
 Once a story is done, if you’re still concerned about
performance, run a test.
 If performance is a problem, fix it
 But, let your customer make the business decision about how
important that fix is.

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 How to Write a Performance Story

 Performance stories need a concrete, customer-valued

goal
 Throughput
• How many operations should complete in a given period of time?
 Latency
• How much delay is acceptable between starting and completing a
single operation?
 Responsiveness
• How much delay is acceptable between starting an operation and
receiving feedback about that operation?

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 Exploratory Testing

 We discover surprises and untested conditions

 XP teams have no separate QA department.
 There’s no independent group of people responsible for
assessing and ensuring the quality of the final release.
 Instead, the whole team - customers, programmers, and testers
– is responsible for the outcome

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 Exploratory Testing

 Good testers have the ability to look at software from a

new perspective, to find surprises, gaps, and holes.
 It takes time for the team to learn which mistakes to
avoid.
 By providing essential information about what the team
overlooks, testers enable the team to improve their work
habits and achieve their goal of producing zero bugs.

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 Exploratory Testing

 One particularly effective way of finding surprises, gaps,

and holes is exploratory testing:
 A style of testing in which you learn about the software while
simultaneously designing and executing tests, using feedback
from the previous test to inform the next.
 Exploratory testing enables you to discover
 Emergent behavior
 Unexpected side effects,
 Holes in the implementation, and
 Risks related to quality attributes
 It’s the perfect complement to XP’s raft of automated
testing techniques.
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 Exploratory Testing

 Exploratory testers use the following four tools to explore

the software
 Charters
 Observation
 Note Taking
 Heuristics

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 Exploratory Testing - Charters

 Before beginning an exploratory session, a tester should

have some idea of what to explore in the system and what
kinds of things to look for.
 This charter helps keep the session focused.
 The charter for a given exploratory session
 Might come from a just-completed story
• e.g., “Explore the Coupon feature”
 It might relate to the interaction among a collection of stories
• e.g., “Explore interactions bet. the Coupon and the Bulk Discount feature”.
 It might involve a quality attribute, such as stability, reliability, or
performance
• “Look for evidence that the Coupon feature impacts performance”

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 Exploratory Testing - Observation

 Automated tests only verify the behavior that

programmers write them to verify
 But humans are capable of noticing subtle clues that
suggest all is not right.
 Exploratory testers are continuously alert for anything
out of the ordinary.
 This may be an editable form field that should be read-only,
 A hard drive that spun up when the software should not be doing
any disk access, or
 A value in a report that looks out of place.

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 Exploratory Testing - Notetaking

 Exploratory testers keep a notepad beside them as they

explore and periodically take notes on the actions they
take
 You can also use screen recorders to keep track of what
you do
 Notes and recordings tell you what you were doing not
just at the time you encountered surprising behavior but
also in the minutes or hours before.

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 Exploratory Testing - Heuristics

 A heuristic is a guide
 a technique that aids in your explorations.
 Boundary testing is an example of a test heuristic.
 If you have a field that’s supposed to accept numbers
from 0 -100,
 you’ll probably try valid values like 0, 100, and
 something in the middle, and
 invalid values like –1 and 101

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