Rapid software development

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 1

 Objectives

To explain how an iterative, incremental
development process leads to faster delivery
of more useful software

To discuss the essence of agile development
methods

To explain the principles and practices of
extreme programming

To explain the roles of prototyping in the
software process

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 2

 Topics covered

Agile methods

Extreme programming

Rapid application development

Software prototyping

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 3

 Rapid software development

Because of rapidly changing business
environments, businesses have to respond
to new opportunities and competition.

This requires software and rapid
development and delivery is not often the
most critical requirement for software
systems.

Businesses may be willing to accept lower
quality software if rapid delivery of essential
functionality is possible.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 4

 Requirements

Because of the changing environment, it is
often impossible to arrive at a stable,
consistent set of system requirements.

Therefore a waterfall model of development
is impractical and an approach to
development based on iterative specification
and delivery is the only way to deliver
software quickly.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 5

 Characteristics of RAD processes

The processes of specification, design and
implementation are concurrent. There is no detailed
specification and design documentation is
minimised.

The system is developed in a series of increments.
End users evaluate each increment and make
proposals for later increments.

System user interfaces are usually developed using
an interactive development system.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 6

 An iterative development process

Define system
deliverables

Design system Specify system Build system Validate

architecture increment increment increment

NO

Deliver final System Validate Integrate

system complete? system increment
YES

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 7

Advantages of incremental development

Accelerated delivery of customer services.
Each increment delivers the highest priority
functionality to the customer.

User engagement with the system. Users
have to be involved in the development
which means the system is more likely to
meet their requirements and the users are
more committed to the system.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 8

Problems with incremental development

Management problems
• Progress can be hard to judge and problems hard to find
because there is no documentation to demonstrate what has
been done.

Contractual problems
• The normal contract may include a specification; without a
specification, different forms of contract have to be used.

Validation problems
• Without a specification, what is the system being tested
against?

Maintenance problems
• Continual change tends to corrupt software structure making it
more expensive to change and evolve to meet new
requirements.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 9

 Prototyping

For some large systems, incremental
iterative development and delivery may be
impractical; this is especially true when
multiple teams are working on different sites.

Prototyping, where an experimental system
is developed as a basis for formulating the
requirements may be used. This system is
thrown away when the system specification
has been agreed.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 10

 Incremental development and prototyping

Incremental
Delivered system
development
Outline
requirements
Throw-away Executable prototype +
prototyping System specification

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 11

 Conflicting objectives

The objective of incremental development is
to deliver a working system to end-users.
The development starts with those
requirements which are best understood.

The objective of throw-away prototyping is to
validate or derive the system requirements.
The prototyping process starts with those
requirements which are poorly understood.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 12

 Agile methods

Dissatisfaction with the overheads involved in design
methods 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.

Agile methods are probably best suited to
small/medium-sized business systems or PC
products.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 13

 Principles of agile methods

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 14

 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 characterises agile methods.

Prioritising 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.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 15

 Extreme programming

Perhaps the best-known and most widely
used agile method.

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.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 16

 The XP release cycle

Select user
Break down
stories for this Plan release
stories to tasks
release

Evaluate Release Develop/integ

rate/
system software test software

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 17

 Extreme programming practices 1

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.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 18

 Extreme programming practices 2
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 own all the
code. Anyone can change anything.
Continuous Integration As soon as 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 over-time 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.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 19

 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.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 20

 Requirements scenarios

In XP, 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.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 21

 Story card for document downloading

Downloading and printing an article

First, you select the article that you want from a displayed list.
You
then have to tell the system how you will pay for it - this can either
be through a subscription, through a company account or by credit
card.
After this, you get a copyright form from the system to fill in and,
when you have submitted this, the article you want is downloaded
onto your computer .
You then choose a printer and a copy of the article is printed.
You
tell the system if printing has been successful.
If the article is a print-only article, you can’
t keep the PDF version
so it is automatically deleted from your computer .

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 22

 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.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 23

 Testing in XP

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.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 24

 Task cards for document downloading

Task 1: Implement principal workflow

Task 2: Implement article catalog and selection

Task 3: Implement payment collection

Payment may be made in 3 different ways. The user

selects which way they wish to pay . If the user
has a library subscription, then they can input the
subscriber key which should be checked by the
system.Alternatively, they can input an organisational
account number.If this is valid, a debit of the cost
of the article is posted to this account. Finally
, they
may input a 16 digit credit card number and expiry
date. This should be checked for validity and, if
valid a debit is posted to that credit card account.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 25

 Test case description

Test 4: Test credit card validity

Input:
A string representing the credit card number and two integers representing
the month and year when the card expires
Tests:
Check that all bytes in the string are digits
Check that the month lies between 1 and 12 and the
year is greater than or equal to the current year
.
Using the first 4 digits of the credit card number
,
check that the card issuer is valid by looking up the
card issuer table. Check credit card validity by submitting the card
number and expiry date information to the card
issuer
Output:
OK or error message indicating that the card is invalid

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 26

 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.

All previous and new tests are automatically
run when new functionality is added. Thus
checking that the new functionality has not
introduced errors.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 27

 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.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 28

 Rapid application development

Agile methods have received a lot of
attention but other approaches to rapid
application development have been used for
many years.

These are designed to develop data-
intensive business applications and rely on
programming and presenting information
from a database.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 29

 RAD environment tools

Database programming language

Interface generator

Links to office applications

Report generators

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 30

 A RAD environment

Interface Office
generator systems

DB Report
programming generator
language

Database mana
gement system

Rapid application
development environment

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 31

 Interface generation

Many applications are based around complex forms
and developing these forms manually is a time-
consuming activity.

RAD environments include support for screen
generation including:
• Interactive form definition using drag and drop
techniques;
• Form linking where the sequence of forms to be
presented is specified;
• Form verification where allowed ranges in form fields is
defined.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 32

 Visual programming

Scripting languages such as Visual Basic
support visual programming where the
prototype is developed by creating a user
interface from standard items and
associating components with these items

A large library of components exists to
support this type of development

These may be tailored to suit the specific
application requirements

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 33

 Visual programming with reuse
Menu component
Date component

File Edit Views Layout Options Help

General
12th January 000
2 Index
Range checking
3.876
script

User prompt
component +
Draw canvas script
component

Tree display
component

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 34

 Problems with visual development

Difficult to coordinate team-based
development.

No explicit system architecture.

Complex dependencies between parts of the
program can cause maintainability problems.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 35

 COTS reuse

An effective approach to rapid development
is to configure and link existing off the shelf
systems.

For example, a requirements management
system could be built by using:
• A database to store requirements;
• A word processor to capture requirements and
format reports;
• A spreadsheet for traceability management;

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 36

 Compound documents

For some applications, a prototype can be created
by developing a compound document.

This is a document with active elements (such as a
spreadsheet) that allow user computations.

Each active element has an associated application
which is invoked when that element is selected.

The document itself is the integrator for the different
applications.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 37

 Application linking

Compound document

Text 1 Table 1 Text 2 Text 3 Sound 1

Table 2 Text 4 Sound 2 Text 5

Word processor Spreadsheet Audio player

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 38

 Software prototyping

A prototype is an initial version of a system
used to demonstrate concepts and try out
design options.

A prototype can be used in:
• The requirements engineering process to help
with requirements elicitation and validation;
• In design processes to explore options and
develop a UI design;
• In the testing process to run back-to-back tests.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 39

 Benefits of prototyping

Improved system usability.

A closer match to users’ real needs.

Improved design quality.

Improved maintainability.

Reduced development effort.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 40

 Back to back testing
Test data

System Application
prototype system

Results
comparator

Difference
report

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 41

 The prototyping process

Establish Define
Develop Evaluate
prototype prototype
objectives functionality prototype prototype

Prototyping Outline Executable Evaluation

plan definition prototype report

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 42

 Throw-away prototypes

Prototypes should be discarded after
development as they are not a good basis
for a production system:
• It may be impossible to tune the system to meet
non-functional requirements;
• Prototypes are normally undocumented;
• The prototype structure is usually degraded
through rapid change;
• The prototype probably will not meet normal
organisational quality standards.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 43

 Key points

An iterative approach to software development leads
to faster delivery of software.

Agile methods are iterative development methods
that aim to reduce development overhead and so
produce software faster.

Extreme programming includes practices such as
systematic testing, continuous improvement and
customer involvement.

The approach to testing in XP is a particular strength
where executable tests are developed before the
code is written.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 44

 Key points

Rapid application development environments
include database programming languages,
form generation tools and links to office
applications.

A throw-away prototype is used to explore
requirements and design options.

When implementing a throw-away prototype,
start with the requirements you least
understand; in incremental development,
start with the best-understood requirements.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 17 Slide 45