Rapid development and delivery is now often the most important requirement for software systems.

Agile development methods emerged in the late 1990s whose aim was to radically reduce the delivery time for working software systems.

Plan-driven and Agile Development

The Principles of Agile Methods

• Customer Involvement
• Incremental Delivery
• People Not Process
• Embrace Change
• Maintain Simplicity

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.

  ⇒ XP Release Cycle

  

  XP Practices

  • Incremental Planning
  • Small Releases
  • Simple Design
  • Test-first Development
  • Refactoring
  • Pair Programming
  • Collective Ownership
  • Continuous Integration
  • Sustainable Pace
  • On-Site Customer

  Example - A ‘prescribing medication’ story

Agile Project Management

Agile project management requires a different approach, which is adapted to incremental development and the practices used in agile methods.

Scrum

Scrum is an agile method that focuses on managing iterative development rather than specific agile practices.

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 ‘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.

Sprint