Agile Software Development

using Extreme programming (XP)

Practices

Software Engineering (10th Edition)

Ian Sommerville (Ch3)

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 1

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.

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 2

Extreme programming

Extreme programming (XP) is a software

development method which is intended to
improve software quality and
responsiveness to changing customer
requirements. As a type of
agile software development, it advocates
frequent "releases" in short development
cycles, which is intended to improve
productivity and introduce checkpoints at
which new customer requirements can be
adopted.
30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 3
The extreme programming release cycle

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 4

Extreme Programming Practices

• Programming in pairs or doing extensive code review,

• Unit testing of all code,
• Avoiding programming of features until they are actually
needed,
• Code simplicity and clarity,
• Expecting changes in the customer's requirements as
time passes and the problem is better understood,
• Frequent communication with the customer and among
programmers
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’.

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.
30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 6
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.
30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 7
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
30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 8
Influential XP practices

 Extreme programming 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
1. User stories for specification
2. Refactoring
3. Test-first development
4. Pair programming

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 9

1. 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.

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 10

A ‘prescribing medication’
story

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 11

Examples of task cards for prescribing
medication

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 12

2. 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.

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 13

2. 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.

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 14

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.

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 15

3. 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.

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 16

3. Test-driven 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 / Nunit.
 All previous and new tests are run automatically when
new functionality is added, thus checking that the
new functionality has not introduced errors.

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 17

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.

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 18

Test case description for dose checking

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 19

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 is 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.

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 20

TDD Example
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.

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 22

4. 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.

30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 23

4. 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.
30/10/2014 Chapter 3 Agile Software Development 24