Chapter 3 – Agile Software Development

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Topics covered

 Agile methods
 Agile development techniques
 Agile project management
 Scaling agile methods

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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

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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.
 Not necessarily waterfall model – plan-driven, incremental
development is possible
 Iteration occurs within activities.
 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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 Agile methods

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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.

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The principles of agile methods

Principle Description
Customer involvement Customers 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 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.

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Agile method applicability

 Product development where a software company is

developing a small or medium-sized product for sale.
 Virtually all software products and apps are now developed
using an agile approach
 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 few external rules and regulations that affect
the software.

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 Agile development techniques

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Extreme programming

 A very influential agile method, developed in the late

1990s, that introduced a range of agile development
techniques.
 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.

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The extreme programming release cycle

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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’. See Figures 3.5 and 3.6.

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.
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.

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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.
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.
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 and agile principles

 Incremental development is supported through small,

frequent system releases.
 Customer involvement means full-time customer
engagement with the team.
 People not process through 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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User stories for requirements

 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.
 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.

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A ‘prescribing medication’ story

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Examples of task cards for prescribing
medication

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Refactoring

 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

 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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Examples of refactoring

 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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Test-first development

 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 harnesses are used to run all component tests
each time that a new release is built.

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Test case description for dose checking

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Problems with test-first development

 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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Pair programming

 Pair programming involves programmers working in

pairs, developing code together.
 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.
 It encourages refactoring as the whole team can benefit
from improving the system code.

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Pair programming

 In pair programming, programmers sit together at the

same computer to develop the software.
 Pairs are created dynamically so that all team members
work with each other during the development process.
 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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