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‫‪18 Aug 2020‬‬

 Chapter 6
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.
 Rapid software development
 Specification, design and implementation are inter-leaved
 System is developed as a series of versions with stakeholders
involved in version evaluation
 User interfaces are often developed using an IDE (Integrated
Development Environment) and graphical toolset.

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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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Agile manifesto

 We are uncovering better ways of developing software

by doing it and helping others do it.
 while there is value in the items on the right, we value
the items on the left more :
LHS (Agile) RHS (Others)
 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
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.
 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 not a lot of external rules and regulations that
affect the software.
 Because of their focus on small, tightly-integrated teams,
there are problems in scaling agile methods to large
systems.

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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.
 Prioritizing changes can be difficult where there are
multiple stakeholders.
 Maintaining simplicity requires extra work.
 Contracts may be a problem as with other approaches to
iterative development.

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Agile methods and software maintenance

 Most organizations spend more on maintaining existing

software than they do on new software development. So,
if agile methods are to be successful, they have to
support maintenance as well as original development.
 Two key issues:
 Are systems that are developed using an agile approach
maintainable, given the emphasis in the development process of
minimizing formal documentation?
 Can agile methods be used effectively for evolving a system in
response to customer change requests?
 Problems may arise if original development team cannot be
maintained.

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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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Plan-driven and agile specification

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Extreme programming (XP)

 Perhaps the best-known and most widely used agile

method.
 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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 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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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 (textbook).

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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Requirements scenarios

 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 scenarios or user
stories.
 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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XP and change

 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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Wend
19 Aug
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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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.
 Automated test harnesses are used to run all component tests
each time that a new release is built.

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Test-first development

 Writing tests before code clarifies the requirements to be

implemented.
 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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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 writes tests as
development proceeds. All new code is therefore
validated to ensure that it is what the customer needs.
 However, 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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Pair programming

 In XP, programmers work in pairs, sitting together to

develop code.
 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 this.
 Measurements suggest that development productivity
with pair programming is similar to that of two people
working independently.

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Pair programming

 In pair programming, programmers sit together at the

same workstation 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 evidence that a pair working together is more efficient
than 2 programmers working separately.

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Advantages of pair programming

 It supports the idea of collective ownership and

responsibility for the system.
 Individuals are not held responsible for problems with the code.
Instead, the team has collective responsibility for resolving these
problems.
 It acts as an informal review process because each line
of code is looked at by at least two people.
 It helps support refactoring, which is a process of
software improvement.
 Where pair programming and collective ownership are used,
others benefit immediately from the refactoring so they are likely
to support the process.
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Agile project management

 The 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.
 The 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 requires a different approach,
which is adapted to incremental development and the
particular strengths of agile methods.

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