Agile Software Development

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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.
• Plan-driven development is essential for some types of system but does not
meet these business needs.
• Agile development methods emerged in the late 1990s whose aim was to
radically reduce the delivery time for working software systems

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 Agile development

• Program specification, design and implementation are inter-leaved

• The system is developed as a series of versions or increments with
stakeholders involved in version specification and evaluation
• Frequent delivery of new versions for evaluation
• Extensive tool support (e.g. automated testing tools) used to support
development.
• Minimal documentation – focus on working code

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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

• 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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 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;

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 The principles of agile methods

Principle Description
Customers should be involved throughout the development
Customer involvement process. Their role is provide and prioritize new system
requirements and to evaluate the iterations of the system.
The software is developed in increments with the customer
Incremental delivery specifying the requirements to be included in each increment.

The skills of the development team should be recognized and

People not process exploited. Team members should be left to develop their own
ways of working without prescriptive processes.

Expect the system requirements to change and so design the

Embrace change system to accommodate these changes.

Focus on simplicity in both the software being developed and

Maintain simplicity in the development process. Wherever possible, actively work
to eliminate complexity from the system.

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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

• The extreme programming release cycle

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 Extreme programming practices (a)

Principle or practice Description

Requirements are recorded on story cards and the stories to be
Incremental planning included in a release are determined by the time available and
their relative priority.

The minimal useful set of functionality that provides business

Small releases 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.
An automated unit test framework is used to write tests for a
Test-first development 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.
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.
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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 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

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 Scrum

• Scrum is an agile method that focuses 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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 Scrum terminology (a)

Scrum term Definition

Development team A self-organizing group of software developers, which should be no more

than 7 people. They are responsible for developing the software and other
essential project documents.
Potentially shippable The software increment that is delivered from a sprint. The idea is that this
product increment should be ‘potentially shippable’ which means that it is in a finished state and
no further work, such as testing, is needed to incorporate it into the final
product. In practice, this is not always achievable.

Product backlog This is a list of ‘to do’ items which the Scrum team must tackle. They may be
feature definitions for the software, software requirements, user stories or
descriptions of supplementary tasks that are needed, such as architecture
definition or user documentation.

Product owner An individual (or possibly a small group) whose job is to identify product
features or requirements, prioritize these for development and continuously
review the product backlog to ensure that the project continues to meet
critical business needs. The Product Owner can be a customer but might also
be a product manager in a software company or other stakeholder
representative.
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 Scrum terminology (b)

Scrum term Definition

Scrum A daily meeting of the Scrum team that reviews progress and prioritizes
work to be done that day. Ideally, this should be a short face-to-face
meeting that includes the whole team.

ScrumMaster The ScrumMaster is responsible for ensuring that the Scrum process is
followed and guides the team in the effective use of Scrum. He or she is
responsible for interfacing with the rest of the company and for ensuring
that the Scrum team is not diverted by outside interference. The Scrum
developers are adamant that the ScrumMaster should not be thought of
as a project manager. Others, however, may not always find it easy to
see the difference.

Sprint A development iteration. Sprints are usually 2-4 weeks long.

Velocity An estimate of how much product backlog effort that a team can cover in
a single sprint. Understanding a team’s velocity helps them estimate
what can be covered in a sprint and provides a basis for measuring
improving performance.

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Scrum sprint cycle

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 The Scrum sprint cycle

• Sprints are fixed length, normally 2–4 weeks.

• 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 from the product
backlog 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 (Scrums) 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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 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

• Maintaining simplicity requires extra work

• Contracts may be a problem as with other approaches

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