Recent
Trend: Agile Software
Development
Lecture 2
Principles, patterns, and practices are important, but
it’s the people that make them work. As Alistair
says, “Process and technology are a second-order
effect on the outcome of a project. The first-order
effect is the people.”
We cannot manage teams of programmers as if they
were systems made up of components driven by a
process. People are not “plug-compatible
programming units.” If our projects are to succeed,
we are going to have to build collaborative and self-
organizing teams.
The Agile Manifesto consists of
four key values:
• Individuals and interactions over processes and
tools.
• Working software over comprehensive
documentation.
• Customer collaboration over contract
negotiation.
• Responding to change over following a plan.
The Twelve Agile Manifesto
• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
Principles.
through early and continuous delivery of
valuable software.
Customers are happier when they receive working software at regular
intervals, rather than waiting extended periods of time between
releases.
• Welcome changing requirements, even late in
development. Agile processes harness change for
the customer's competitive advantage.
View changes to the requirements as good things, because those changes
mean that the team has learned more about what it will take to satisfy the
market.
• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of
weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to
the shorter time scale. Scrum accommodates this principle since
the team operates in software sprints or iterations that ensure regular
What is
SCRUM?
Scrum is one of the many project management agile
methods. It aims at boosting team productivity and velocity,
optimizing product value by relying on regular feedbacks
from final users.
SCRUM MASTER:
He is NOT a project manager! The Scrum Master is actually
responsible for promoting and supporting Scrum as defined in the
Scrum Guide. How? By helping everyone understand the theory,
practices, rules, and values of Scrum. In other words, the Scrum
Master’s role is to help everyone improve interactions to maximize
the value created by the Scrum team.
PRODUCT OWNER:
Product Owner is the bridge between the business part and the
technical part of the project. He is the link between the client and
the development team.
SPRINT:
A sprint is a short period of time – or iteration – of 2 weeks up to 1 month to the
max, during which the development team will design, realize and test new
features.
PRODUCT BACKLOG:
It is a prioritized list of deliverables (such as new features) that should
be implemented as part of a project or product development.
SPRINT BACKLOG:
It is the short-term plan for the team’s sprint. The product backlog is the
long-term
plan for the product.
SPRINT RETROSPECTIVE:
It is usually the last thing done in a sprint. The entire team, including
both the
Scrum Master and the product owner participate. During the retrospective, the
team reflects on what happened in the iteration and identifies actions for
improvement going forward.
• Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.
Better decisions are made when the business and technical team are
aligned.
• Build projects around motivated individuals. Give
them the environment and support they need, and
trust them to get the job done.
Motivated teams are more likely to deliver their best work than unhappy
teams.
• The most efficient and effective method of
conveying information to and within a development
team is face to-face conversation.
• Working software is the primary measure of
progress. Delivering functional software to the customer is the
ultimate factor that measures progress.
• Agile processes promote sustainable development.
The sponsors, developers, and users should be
able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
Teams establish a repeatable and maintainable speed at which they can
deliver working software, and they repeat it with each release.
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and
good design enhances agility.
The right skills and good design ensures the team can maintain the pace,
constantly improve the product, and sustain change.
• Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of
work not done—is essential.
Develop just enough to get the job done for right now.
• The best architectures, requirements, and
designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
Agile team members work together on all aspects of the project.
Each is
allowed input into the whole. No single team member is responsible for
the architecture or the requirements or the tests. The team shares those
responsibilities, and each team member has influence over them.
• At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to
become more
effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior
accordingly. An agile team continually adjusts its organization,
rules, conventions, relationships, etc. An agile team knows that its
environment is continuously changing and knows that they must
change with that environment to remain agile.
Extreme Programming (XP) is one of the
numerous Agile frameworks applied by IT
companies. But its key feature — emphasis
on technical aspects of software
development — distinguishes XP from the
other approaches.
Software engineer Ken Beck introduced XP in the
90s with the goal of finding ways to write high-
qualitative software quickly and being able to
adapt to customers’ changing requirements.
