Agile Software Development

 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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What is “Agility”?

 Effective (rapid and adaptive) response to change

 Effective communication among all stakeholders
 Drawing the customer onto the team
 Organizing a team so that it is in control of the work
performed

Yielding …
 Rapid, incremental delivery of software

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Why Agile?

 Traditional software processes have the following problems:

 Lengthy development times (typical 1-5 years): For many companies,
especially, this is too long and not appropriate. In three years,
companies will have changed their focus or products. So, if the project
is successful by traditional standards, it may be too late.
 Inability to cope with changing requirements: Often, the environment
changes very rapidly, forcing the business to adapt and change.
Traditional software development methods do not handle changing
requirements well. They assume that the later a change is made, the
more expensive it will be.
 Assumption that requirements are completely understood before the
project begins: Most users are not capable of expressing their
requirements in clear and unambiguous language. In spite of the valiant
efforts of many systems analysts, the requirements will be incomplete,
and many times incorrect.
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 Agility and the Cost of Change

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 Agile manifesto 2001

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Agile Principles

 The Agile Manifesto is based on 12 principles:

1. Customer satisfaction by rapid delivery of useful software.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development.
3. Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months).
4. Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers.
5. Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted.
6. Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (colocation).
7. Working software is the principal measure of progress.
8. Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design.
10.Simplicity - the art of maximizing the amount of work not done - is essential
11.Self-organizing teams.
12.Regular adaptation to changing circumstances.

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Agile development

 Is driven by customer descriptions of what is required (scenarios)

 Recognizes that plans are short-lived
 Develops software iteratively
 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 multiple ‘software increments’ for evaluation
 Adapts as changes occur
 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

 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 development

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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 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 Customers should be closely involved throughout the
involvement 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 lots 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

 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.

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Agile development techniques

 Adaptive Software Development (ASD)

 Agile Unified Process (AUP)
 Crystal family Methods (Crystal Clear, Crystal Orange)
 Disciplined Agile Delivery
 Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)
 Extreme Programming (XP)
 Feature Driven Development (FDD)
 Lean software development
 Scrum
 ……….

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 Extreme programming

 A very influential agile method, developed in the late

1990s, that introduced a range of agile development
techniques.
 The most widely used agile process, originally proposed
by Kent Beck
 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 two
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 Planning

Begins with the creation of “user stories”

Agile team assesses each story and assigns a
cost
Stories are grouped for a deliverable increment
A commitment is made on delivery date
After the first increment “project velocity” is used
to help define subsequent delivery dates for
other increments

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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 examples later

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

 XP practices reflects the principles of the agile manifesto:

 Incremental development is supported through small,
frequent system releases.
 Customer involvement means full-time customer
engagement with the team.
 People not process is supported through pair
programming, collective ownership and a process that
avoids long working hours.
 Change is supported through regular system releases.
 Maintaining simplicity through constant refactoring of
code.

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Influential XP practices

 Extreme programming has a technical focus and is not

easy to integrate with management practice in most
organizations.
 Consequently, companies pick and choose XP practices
suitable for their way of working
 Practices are used in conjunction with a management
focused agile method such as Scrum
 Key practices
 User stories for specification
 Refactoring
 Test-first development
 Pair programming
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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-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.
 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.
 Cons: 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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 Test case description for dose checking

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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 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.

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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.
 Should be used with care: Studying the value of pair-
programming led to mixed results
 Productivity is comparable to two individual programmers in case
of beginners
 In case of experienced programmers it led to loss of productivity

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Agile project management

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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
practices used in agile methods.

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 Scrum

 Scrum is an agile method that provides a project

management framework; focusing on managing iterative
development rather than specific agile practices.
 There are three phases in Scrum.
 The initial phase is an outline planning phase where you
establish the general objectives for the project and design the
software architecture.
 This is followed by a series of sprint cycles, where each cycle
develops an increment of the system.
 The project closure phase wraps up the project, completes
required documentation such as system help frames and user
manuals and assesses the lessons learned from the project.

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 The Scrum process

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Scrum terminology (a)

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 The software increment that is delivered from a sprint. The idea is
shippable product that this should be ‘potentially shippable’; that it is in a finished state
increment 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, e.g. 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.
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Scrum terminology (b)

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.

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 The Scrum sprint cycle

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

 The starting point for planning is the product backlog, which is the
list of work to be done on the project.
 The selection phase involves all of the project team who work with
the customer to select the features and functionality from the
product backlog to be developed during the sprint.
 Once these are agreed, the team organize themselves to develop
the software.
 The team is isolated from the customer and the organization, with all
communications channelled through the ‘Scrum master’.
 The role of the Scrum master is to protect the development team from external
distractions.

 At the end of the sprint, the work done is reviewed and presented to
stakeholders. The next sprint cycle then begins.
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 Scrum sprint cycle

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Scrum

 Originally proposed by Schwaber and Beedle

 Terminology derived from the Rugby game
 Scrum—distinguishing features
 Development work is partitioned into chunks
 Testing and documentation are on-going as the product is
constructed
 Work occurs in “sprints” and is derived from a “backlog” of
existing requirements
 Meetings are very short and sometimes conducted without chairs
 “demos” are delivered to the customer with the time-box allocated
The Scrum framework consists of roles, events, artifacts, and rules.

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Scrum Roles

 Sprints are basic units of development of the total software product.

 They are short in duration (2-4 weeks)
 Time-boxed (duration is fixed, but scope may be adjusted if
needed).
 Ideally, a potentially shippable product is produced at the end of
each sprint.
 Scrum Roles: A Scrum project defines three core roles
 The Product Owner, who represents the voice of the customer
and ensures that the team delivers value to the business
 The development team, who actually produce the software
 A Scrum Master, who keeps the team on track and ensures
Scrum is followed.
 There are also two additional ancillary roles: the stakeholders
and the managers.
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 Teamwork in Scrum

 The ‘Scrum master’ is a facilitator who arranges daily

meetings, tracks the backlog of work to be done, records
decisions, measures progress against the backlog and
communicates with customers and management outside
of the team.
 The whole team attends short daily meetings (Scrums)
where all team members share information, describe
their progress since the last meeting, problems that have
arisen and what is planned for the following day.
 This means that everyone on the team knows what is going on
and, if problems arise, can re-plan short-term work to cope with
them.

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 Scrum Artifacts and Rules

 Scrum Artifacts: Artifacts to be used for controlling the project:

 The product backlog, an ordered list of all the remaining requirements or
stories for a product. Everybody can see what still needs to be done
overall (although developers focus mostly on the sprint backlog).
 The sprint backlog is the ordered list of tasks need to be done for the
current sprint. Tasks here are broken down to be small (4 to 16 hours
usually), so developers know exactly what to do. Developers choose
their next task based on the sprint backlog and their particular skills.
 The increment : the sum of all requirements implemented in this sprint
and all previous sprints. This should be a shippable (albeit not feature-
complete) project.
 Scrum Rules: Based on three "pillar" concepts:
1. Transparency: Making the process visible and having a common
definition of when an item is completed so developers, the product
owner, and the Scrum Master can agree on whether an item is finished.
2. Inspection (of artifacts and progress), and
3. Adaptation (whenever a significant deviation is detected, correct it).
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Scrum Events

 Scrum Events: The Scrum process is defined as three sequential events:

1. The sprint planning meeting, in which the product owner and the team
decide on what will be implemented during that sprint.
2. The daily Scrum, a very short (15 minutes or less) meeting in which team
members synchronize, make sure they are on-track, and ask for help if
needed. Oftentimes all participants are standing instead of sitting, to ensure
meetings are short.
3. The sprint review, held at the end of the sprint, to inspect its products and
adapt the product backlog if needed. During this review the product owner
identifies what has been done and discusses the product backlog. The
development team demonstrates the work it has done answers questions,
and discusses what went well, what problems they faced, and how they
solved them. Finally the entire team collaborates on what to do next (which
is input for the sprint planning for the next sprint).

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Scrum benefits

 The 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.

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 Distributed Scrum

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 Scaling agile methods

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Scaling agile methods

 Agile methods have proved to be successful for small and medium

sized projects that can be developed by a small co-located team.
 It is sometimes argued that the success of these methods comes
because of improved communications which is possible when
everyone is working together.
 Scaling up agile methods involves changing these to cope with
larger, longer projects where there are multiple development teams,
perhaps working in different locations.
 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.

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Practical problems with agile methods

 The informality of agile development is incompatible with

the legal approach to contract definition that is commonly
used in large companies.
 Agile methods are most appropriate for new software
development rather than software maintenance. Yet the
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.

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 Contractual issues

 Most software contracts for custom systems are based

around a specification and deliverables which sets out
what has to be implemented by the system developer for
the system customer.
 However, this precludes interleaving specification and
development as is the norm in agile development.
 A contract that pays for developer time rather than
functionality is required.
 However, this is seen as a high risk by many legal
departments because what has to be delivered cannot
be guaranteed.

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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.
 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.
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Agile versus Plan-based factors

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System issues

 Scale: How large is the system being developed?

 Agile methods are most effective a relatively small co-located team
who can communicate informally.
 Type: 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.
 Lifetime: What is the expected system lifetime?
 Long-lifetime systems require documentation to communicate the
intentions of the system developers to the support team.
 Regulation: 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.

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 People and teams

 Competence: 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.
 However, within large organizations, there are likely to be a wide
range of skills and abilities
 Distribution: How is the development team organized?
 Design documents may be required if the team is distributed.
 Technology: What support technologies are available?
 IDE support for visualisation and program analysis is essential if
design documentation is not available.

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 Organizational issues

 Traditional engineering organizations have a culture of plan-based

development, as this is the norm in engineering - There may be
cultural resistance to agile methods
 Is it standard organizational practice to develop a detailed system
specification?
 Can informal agile development fit into the organizational culture of
detailed documentation?
 Will customer representatives be available to provide feedback of
system increments?
 Project managers who do not have experience of agile methods
may be reluctant to accept the risk of a new approach.
 Large organizations often have quality procedures and standards
that all projects are expected to follow and, because of their
bureaucratic nature, these are likely to be incompatible with agile
methods
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Agile principles and organizational problems

Principle Practice
Customer This depends on having a customer who is willing and able to spend time with
involvement the development team and who can represent all system stakeholders. Often,
customer representatives have other demands on their time and cannot play
a full part in the software development.
Where there are external stakeholders, such as regulators, it is difficult to
represent their views to the agile team.

Embrace change Prioritizing changes can be extremely difficult, especially in systems for which
there are many stakeholders. Typically, each stakeholder gives different
priorities to different changes.

Incremental delivery Rapid iterations and short-term planning for development does not always fit
in with the longer-term planning cycles of business planning and marketing.
Marketing managers may need to know what product features several months
in advance to prepare an effective marketing campaign.
Maintain simplicity Under pressure from delivery schedules, team members may not have time to
carry out desirable system simplifications - refactoring

People not process Individual team members may not have suitable personalities for the intense
involvement that is typical of agile methods, and therefore may not interact
well with other team members.

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Factors affecting Agile methods in large systems

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 Factors affecting Agile methods for large systems

 Large systems are usually collections of separate,

communicating systems, where separate teams develop each
system.
 Frequently, these teams are working in different places,
sometimes in different time zones.
 Large systems are ‘brownfield systems’, that is they include
and interact with a number of existing systems. Many of the
system requirements are concerned with this interaction and
so don’t really lend themselves to flexibility and incremental
development.
 Where several systems are integrated to create a system, a
significant fraction of the development is concerned with
system configuration rather than original code development.

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 Factors affecting Agile methods for large systems

 Large systems and their development processes are

often constrained by external rules and regulations
limiting the way that they can be developed.
 Large systems have a long procurement and
development time. It is difficult to maintain coherent
teams who know about the system over that period as,
inevitably, people move on to other jobs and projects.
 Large systems usually have a diverse set of
stakeholders. It is practically impossible to involve all of
these different stakeholders in the development process.

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IBM’s Agility Scaling Model - ASM

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Scaling up to large systems

 A completely incremental approach to requirements

engineering is impossible.
 There cannot be a single product owner or customer
representative.
 For large systems development, it is not possible to focus only
on the code of the system.
 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.

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 Multi-team Scrum – Key characteritics

 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
 The 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.

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 Agile and plan-driven methods

 Most projects include elements of plan-driven and agile

processes. Deciding on the balance depends on:
 Is it important to have a very detailed specification and design
before moving to implementation? If so, you probably need to use
a plan-driven approach.
 Is an incremental delivery strategy, where you deliver the software
to customers and get rapid feedback from them, realistic? If so,
consider using agile methods.
 How large is the system that is being developed? Agile methods
are most effective when the system can be developed with a small
co-located team who can communicate informally. This may not be
possible for large systems that require larger development teams
so a plan-driven approach may have to be used.

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Agile and plan-driven methods

Principle Agile Plan Driven

Requirements Assumes they will change; requirements are Assumes they will not change during the
collected informally at the beginning of the project. A complete, detailed formal
project, and then at the beginning of each requirements document is necessary for
iteration. Uses constant user interaction success. Any changes in requirements after
instead of formal requirements. the design or implementation has started
will be costly.

Design Informal and iterative Formal and done up front, after all
requirements are known.
User involvement Crucial, frequent, throughout the whole Required only at the beginning
process (requirements solicitation and analysis) and
at the end (acceptance testing).

Communication Done informally, throughout the project. Relies mainly on documents and formal
memos and meetings

Process complexity Relatively low High. RUP (2002) describes more than 100
artifacts, 9 disciplines, 30 roles, and 4
phases.
Documentation Minimal, only what is necessary; relies on Requires heavy, formal documentation of
source code as the ultimate documentation. every phase of the project.
Overhead Low. Relatively high

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Selection of Development Process - Guidlines

Principle Agile Plan Driven

Scope/size Small; limited to 1 team of up to 10 Better suited to larger projects; scales up
people. to the largest projects; can be scaled down
for smaller projects.

Criticality Relatively low; not suitable for life- Can be used for mission-critical systems
critical systems without adaptation (maybe with minimal modifications).

People More suitable for team players, "good Defines many roles, which can be
citizens" who can do design and appropriate for most kinds of people;
programming adequately. Agile doesn't require tight team playing; almost
requires strict adherence to certain any personality will work, as long as the
practices. team member can follow rules.

Company Better suited for small co-located Better suited for larger companies with
culture companies with relaxed cultures. possibly geographically remote sites and
more formal cultures.

Stability Copes easily with changes in Less suited to cope with changes. Assumes
requirements or environment a relatively stable environment where
requirements don't change much. Can be
Dr. Noha Adly adapted.
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