Ch3 - Agile SW Development

Chapter 3 – Agile Software
Development
30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 1

Objectives
 Understand the rationale for agile software development

methods, the agile manifesto, and the differences between
agile and plan-driven development;
 Know about important agile development practices such as
user stories, refactoring, pair programming and test-first
development;
 Understand the Scrum approach to agile project
management;
 Understand the issues of scaling agile development methods
and combining agile approaches with plan-driven approaches
in the development of large software systems.

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

Rapid software development
 Businesses now operate in a global, fast-changing

environment.
▪ It is practically impossible to produce a set of stable software
requirements.
▪ Software has to evolve quickly to reflect changing business needs.
 Rapid development and delivery is now often the most
critical requirement for software systems.
 Rapid software development processes are designed to
produce useful software quickly.
 Software is not developed as a single unit but as a series
of increments.
Agile Methods
 The system is developed as a series of versions or

increments with stakeholders involved in version
specification and evaluation.
 Main characteristics:
▪ Program specification, design and implementation are inter-
leaved
▪ Frequent delivery of new versions for evaluation
▪ Extensive tool support used to support development, e.g., tools
to automate user interface production, automated testing tools,
etc.
▪ Minimal documentation – focus on working code
Plan-driven and agile development

Agile development vs plan-driven
 In an agile method:
▪ Design and implementation are central activities in the software
process.
▪ Requirements elicitation and testing are incorporated into design
and implementation.
▪ Iteration occurs across activities and as such, requirements and
design are developed together, rather than separately.
 In a plan-driven approach:
▪ Identifies separate stages in software process with outputs
associated with each stage.
▪ Iteration occurs within activities with formal documents used to
communicate between stages of the process.
 Note: A plan-driven software process can support
incremental development and delivery.
Origin of Agile methods
 Early 1980s and early 1990s

▪ Widespread view of achieving better software – using plan-
driven approaches to software development.
▪ Originated from software engineering community responsible for
developing large, long-lived software systems.
 Plan-driven approaches involve a significant overhead in
planning, designing, and documenting the system.
 This overhead is justified when:
▪ work of multiple development teams has to be coordinated;
▪ system is a critical system and;
▪ many different people will be involved in maintaining the
software over its lifetime.
Origin of Agile methods
 Heavyweight, plan-driven development approach not

appropriate for development of small and medium-sized
business systems
▪ Overhead involved is so large that it dominates the software
development process.
 Dissatisfaction with these heavyweight approaches led
to the creation of agile methods
 Agile 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.
Aims of agile methods and Agile
manifesto
 Aims of agile methods;

▪ 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.
 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
▪ That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items
on the left more.
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.

Situations where agile methods have
been successful
1. Product development where a software company is

developing a small or medium-sized product for sale.
2. 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 stakeholders and regulations that
affect the software.
 Agile methods work well in these situations because:
▪ continuous communications is easy between between product
manager or system customer and development team.
▪ there is no need to coordinate parallel development streams.

Agile development techniques

Extreme programming (XP)
 XP takes an ‘extreme’ approach to iterative development

▪ Several new versions of a system may be developed by different
programmers, integrated and tested in a day;
▪ Increments are delivered to customers every 2 weeks;
▪ Release deadlines are never slipped; if there are development
problems, the customer is consulted and functionality is removed from
the planned release.
▪ All tests must be run for every build and the build is only accepted if
tests run successfully.
 In XP, requirements are expressed as scenarios (called user
stories), which are implemented directly as a series of tasks.
 Programmers work in pairs and develop tests for each task
before writing code.

The extreme programming release cycle

Extreme programming practices
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’.
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.
Extreme programming practices
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.
Influential XP practices
 Extreme programming has a technical focus

▪ It 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
▪ User stories for specification
▪ Refactoring
▪ Test-first development
▪ Pair programming

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 written on cards
 User stories are then broken down into implementation
tasks.
▪ These tasks are the basis of schedule and cost estimates.
 Customer chooses stories for inclusion in the next
release based on their priorities and the schedule
estimates.

A Story card for prescribing medication

Examples of task cards for prescribing
medication

Refactoring
 Traditional software engineering requires 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.
 Programming team look for possible software
improvements and make these improvements even
where there is no immediate need for them.
Refactoring
 Fundamental problem of incremental development - local

changes tend to degrade the software structure.
▪ Consequently, further changes to software become harder and
harder to implement.
 Refactoring improves the software structure and
readability
▪ So avoids structural deterioration that naturally occurs when
software is changed.
▪ 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.
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.
 Replacement of inline code with calls to methods that
have been included in a program library.

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.
▪ Use of automated testing frameworks.

Test-driven development
 Tests are written first before writing the code.

 Writing tests before code
▪ Clarifies the requirements to be implemented.
▪ Tests can be run as code is being written and discover problems
during development.
 Tests are written as programs rather than data so that
they can be executed automatically.
▪ Usually relies on a testing framework such as Junit.
 Previous and new tests are run automatically when new
functionality is added to make sure that new functionality
has not introduced errors.
Test-driven development
 XP’s test-first approach:

▪ assumes that user stories have been developed and have been
broken down into a set of task cards.
 Each task generates one or more unit tests that check
the implementation described in that task.
 Customer’s role in the testing process is to help develop
acceptance tests for stories to be implemented in next
release of the system.

Test case description for dose checking

Problems with test-first development
 Programmers prefer programming to testing and

sometimes they may take short cuts when writing tests.
 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 one may have a lot of system tests, test sets
may not provide complete coverage.

Pair programming
 Pair programming involves programmers working in

pairs, developing code together.
 Pairs are created dynamically so that all team members
work with each other during development process.
 Some advantages of pair programming:
▪ This helps develop common ownership of code and spreads
knowledge across the team.
▪ Serves as an informal review process as each line of code is
looked at by more than 1 person.
▪ Encourages refactoring as the whole team can benefit from
improving the system code.
▪ Reduces the overall risks to a project when team members
leave.
Agile project management
 Principal responsibility of software project managers is to

manage the project so that the software is delivered on
time and within the planned budget for the project.
 Standard approach to project management is plan-
driven.
 Managers draw up a plan for the project showing
▪ what should be delivered,
▪ when it should be delivered and
▪ who will work on the development of the project deliverables.

Agile project management
 Agile project management requires a different approach.

 Scrum agile method was developed to provide a
framework for organizing agile projects.
 It focuses on managing iterative development rather than
specific agile practices.
 Next 2 slides summarizes Scrum terminology and what it
means.

Scrum terminology
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.
Scrum terminology
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.

Scrum sprint cycle

The Scrum sprint cycle
 Sprints are fixed length, normally 2–4 weeks.

 Starting point for planning is the product backlog, which
is the list of work to be done on the project.
 Selection phase involves selecting features and
functionality from product backlog to be developed
during sprint.
 Once these are agreed, the team organize themselves to
develop the software.
 At the end of a sprint, the work done is reviewed and
presented to stakeholders. The next sprint cycle then
begins.
Teamwork in Scrum
 The ‘Scrum master’ is a facilitator whose responsibilities

are:
▪ arranging Scrums (daily meetings),
▪ tracking backlog of work to be done,
▪ recording decisions made at Scrums,
▪ measuring progress against the backlog and
▪ communicating with customers and management outside
development team.
 All team members attend Scrums, where they share
information, describe their progress since the last
meeting, problems that have arisen and what is planned
for the following day.
Scrum benefits
 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.

Requirements of distributed Scrum

Scaling agile methods
 Agile methods have proved to be successful for small

and medium sized projects.
 The need for faster delivery of software, which is more
suited to customer needs, also applies to both larger
systems and larger companies.
 Agile methods have evolved for use in both large
software systems and large companies.

Scaling out and scaling up
 ‘Scaling up’ is concerned with using agile methods for

developing large software systems that cannot be
developed by a small team.
 ‘Scaling out’ is concerned with how agile methods can
be introduced across a large organization with many
years of software development experience.
 When scaling agile methods it is important to maintain
agile fundamentals:
▪ Flexible planning, frequent system releases, continuous
integration, test-driven development and good team
communications.
Agile methods for large systems
 Agile methods have to evolve to be used for large-scale

software development.
 Large-scale software systems are much more complex and
difficult to understand and manage.
 Six principal factors contribute to this complexity:

Scaling up to large systems
 No single model is appropriate for all large-scale agile

products.
 However, approaches to scaling agile methods have a
number of things in common:
▪ A completely incremental approach to requirements engineering is
impossible.
▪ There cannot be a single product owner or customer representative.
▪ It is not possible to focus only on the code of the system; up-front
design and system documentation are needed.
▪ Cross-team communication mechanisms have to be designed and
used.
▪ Continuous integration is practically impossible. However, it is essential
to maintain frequent system builds and regular releases of the system.

Multi-team Scrum
 Scrum has been adapted for large-scale development.

 Key characteristics of multi-team Scrum:
▪ Role replication – each team has a Product Owner for their work
component and ScrumMaster.
▪ Product architects – each team chooses a product architect and
these architects collaborate to design and evolve the overall
system architecture.
▪ Release alignment – dates of product releases from each team
are aligned so that a demonstrable and complete system is
produced.
▪ Scrum of Scrums – there is a daily Scrum of Scrums where
representatives from each team meet to discuss progress and
plan work to be done.
Practical problems with agile methods
 Informality of agile development is incompatible with the

legal approach to contract definition commonly used in
large companies.
 Agile methods are most appropriate for new software
development rather than software maintenance. Yet
majority of software costs in large companies come from
maintaining their existing software systems.
 Agile methods are designed for small co-located teams
yet much software development now involves worldwide
distributed teams.

Agile methods and software maintenance
 Most organizations spend more on maintaining existing

software than they do on new software development.
▪ If agile methods are to be successful, they have to support
maintenance as well as original development.
 Key problems are:
▪ Lack of product documentation
▪ Keeping customers involved in the development process
▪ Maintaining the continuity of the development team
 Agile development relies on the development team
knowing and understanding what has to be done.
▪ For long-lifetime systems, this is a real problem as the original
developers will not always work on the system.
Agile and plan-driven methods
 Fundamental requirement of scaling agile methods is to

integrate them with plan-driven approaches.
 Deciding on the balance between the two, a range of
technical, human and organizational questions have to be
answered.
 These relate to:
▪ system being developed,
▪ development team and,
▪ organizations developing and procuring the system.

Agile and plan-based factors

Technical questions
 How large is the system being developed?

▪ Agile methods are most effective with a relatively small co-located
team who can communicate informally.
 What type of system is being developed?
▪ Systems that require a lot of analysis before implementation need
a fairly detailed design to carry out this analysis.
 What is the expected system lifetime?
▪ Long-lifetime systems require documentation to communicate the
intentions of the system developers to the support team.
 Is the system subject to external regulation?
▪ If a system is regulated you will probably be required to produce
detailed documentation as part of the system safety case.
Human questions
 How good are the designers and programmers in the

development team?
▪ It is sometimes argued that agile methods require higher skill
levels than plan-based approaches in which programmers simply
translate a detailed design into code.
 How is the development team organized?
▪ Design documents may be required if the team is distributed.
 What support technologies are available?
▪ IDE support for visualisation and program analysis is essential if
design documentation is not available.

Organizational questions
 Is it standard organizational practice to develop a

detailed system specification?
 Will customer representatives be available to provide
feedback of system increments?
 Can informal agile development fit into the organizational
culture of detailed documentation?

Key points
 Agile methods are incremental development methods that focus on

rapid software development, frequent releases of the software,
reducing process overheads by minimizing documentation and
producing high-quality code.
 Agile development practices include
▪ User stories for system specification
▪ Frequent releases of the software,
▪ Continuous software improvement
▪ Test-first development
▪ Customer participation in the development team.

Key points
 Scrum is an agile method that provides a project

management framework.
▪ It is centred round a set of sprints, which are fixed time periods
when a system increment is developed.
 Many practical development methods are a mixture of
plan-based and agile development.
 Scaling agile methods for large systems is difficult.
▪ Large systems need up-front design and some documentation
and organizational practice may conflict with the informality of
agile approaches.

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Chapter 3 – Agile Software

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 1

 Understand the rationale for agile software development

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 2

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 3

 Businesses now operate in a global, fast-changing

 The system is developed as a series of versions or

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 6

 Early 1980s and early 1990s

 Heavyweight, plan-driven development approach not

 Aims of agile methods;

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 11

1. Product development where a software company is

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 12

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 13

 XP takes an ‘extreme’ approach to iterative development

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 14

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 15

Principle or practice Description

 Extreme programming has a technical focus

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 18

 In XP, a customer or user is part of the XP team and is

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 19

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 20

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 21

 Traditional software engineering requires to design for

 Fundamental problem of incremental development - local

 Re-organization of a class hierarchy to remove duplicate

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 24

 Testing is central to XP and XP has developed an

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 25

 Tests are written first before writing the code.

 XP’s test-first approach:

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 27

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 28

 Programmers prefer programming to testing and

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 29

 Pair programming involves programmers working in

 Principal responsibility of software project managers is to

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 31

 Agile project management requires a different approach.

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 32

Scrum term Definition

Scrum term Definition

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

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 34

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 35

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

 The ‘Scrum master’ is a facilitator whose responsibilities

 Product is broken down into a set of manageable and

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 38

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 39

 Agile methods have proved to be successful for small

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 40

 ‘Scaling up’ is concerned with using agile methods for

 Agile methods have to evolve to be used for large-scale

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 42

 No single model is appropriate for all large-scale agile