Agile Software Development

Gianfranco Lombardo, Ph.D

[email protected]
 Rapid Software Development

♦ Rapid development and delivery is now often the

most important requirement for software systems
▪ Businesses operate with fast changing requirements 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

♦ The system is developed as a series of versions or

increments with stakeholders involved in version
specification and evaluation

♦ Program specification, design and implementation

are interleaved

♦ Frequent delivery of new versions for evaluation

♦ Extensive tool support (e.g. automated testing

tools) used to make fast the development

♦ Minimal documentation – focus on working code

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 Agile Method Principles (1/2)
♦ Customer involvement
▪ They should be closely involved throughout the
development process
▪ Their role is provide and prioritize new system
requirements and to evaluate the iterations of the
system
♦ Incremental delivery
▪ 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
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 Agile Method Principles (2/2)
♦ 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

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 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

▪ There are few external rules and regulations that affect the
software

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 Extreme Programming

♦ Extreme Programming (XP) is a very influential agile

method, developed in the late 1990s, that 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

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 Extreme Programming Release Cycle

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 Extreme Programming Practices (1/3)

♦ 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
♦ Simple design
▪ Enough design is carried out to meet the current
requirements and no more
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 Extreme Programming Practices (2/3)

♦ 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
♦ Pair programming
▪ Developers work in pairs, checking each other’s work and
providing the support to always do a good job
♦ Collective ownership
▪ The pairs of developers work on all areas of the system, so
that no islands of expertise develop and all the developers
take responsibility for all of the code. Anyone can change
anything
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 Extreme Programming Practices (3/3)

♦ 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
♦ 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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 XP & Agile Principles

♦ Incremental development is supported through

small, frequent system releases
♦ Customer involvement means full-time customer
engagement with the team
♦ Focus is on people not on processes. Main features
are pair programming, collective ownership and a
process that avoids long working hours
♦ Change supported through regular system releases
♦ Maintaining simplicity through constant
refactoring of code
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 Influential XP Practices

♦ XP has a technical focus and is not easy to integrate

with management practice in most organizations
♦ Consequently, while agile development uses
practices from XP, the method as originally defined
is not widely used
♦ Key practices mostly used are
▪ User stories for specification
▪ Refactoring
▪ Test-first development
▪ Pair programming

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 Requirements User Stories

♦ 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 user stories or

scenarios

♦ 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

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 A Prescribing Medication Story

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 Prescribing Medication Examples Task Cards

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 Test-Driven Development

♦ Writing tests before code clarifies the requirements

to be implemented (test-first development)

♦ 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
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 Dose Checking Test Case Description

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 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 helps to define tests

as development proceeds. All new code is therefore
validated to ensure that it is what the customer needs

♦ However, often 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

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 Test Automation

♦ Test automation means that tests are written as

executable components before the task is
implemented
▪ These testing components should be stand-alone,
should simulate the submission of input to be tested
and should check that the result meets the output
specification. An automated test framework (e.g. Junit)
is a system that makes it easy to write executable tests
and submit a set of tests for execution
♦ As testing is automated, there must be always a set
of tests that can be quickly and easily executed
▪ Whenever any functionality is added to the system, the
tests can be run and problems that the new code has
introduced can be caught immediately

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 Test First Development Problems

♦ 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

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 Refactoring (1/2)

♦ 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
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 Refactoring (2/2)

♦ 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

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 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

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 Refactoring Principles

♦ Avoid to do both refactoring and adding

functionality at the same time

♦ Check the availability of good tests before

beginning refactoring
▪ Run the tests as often as possible; that way you will
know quickly if your changes have broken anything
♦ Take short deliberate steps
▪ Refactoring often involves many localized changes that
result in a large scale change
▪ If steps are small and test is done after each step, then
refactoring activities should be reduced debugging

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 Pair Programming (1/2)

♦ Pair programming involves programmers working

in pairs, developing code together

♦ Programmers sit together at the same computer to

develop the software

♦ 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 improving the system code

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 Pair Programming (2/2)

♦ Pairs are created dynamically so that all team

members work with each other during the
development process
♦ This helps develop common ownership of code and
spreads knowledge across the team
♦ 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 some evidence that suggests that a pair
working together is more efficient than 2
programmers working separately

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