Midterm Material - Agile Software Development

Question 1

Why was agile introduced and when?

Answer 1

Agile was introduced in the 1990s with the aim of reducing the delivery time for software systems.

Question 2

How does agile reduce delivery time?

Answer 2

Agile reduces overhead in the software process by limiting documentation and by making it faster to respond and make changes to requirements.

Question 3

What are the four values from the Agile Manifesto?

Answer 3

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan

Question 4

What are the 12 principles of agile methods?

Answer 4

1. Customer satisfaction through early and continuous software development
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in delivery
3. Frequent delivery of working software
4. Collaboration between business stakeholders and developers daily through the project
5. Support, trust, and motivate the people involved
6. Enable face-to-face interactions
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress
8. Agile processes to support a consistent development pace
9. Attention to technical detail and design enhances agility
10. Simplicity - the art of maximizing the amount of work not done - is essential
11. Self-organizing teams encourage great architectures, requirements, and design
12. Regular reflections on how to become more effective

Question 5

What is “extreme programming”?

Answer 5

Extreme programming is an agile method with a focus on intense development but not as much of the project management. New versions may be built several times per day and increments are delivered to customers every 2 weeks.

Question 6

What are the stages of the extreme programming release cycle?

Answer 6

Select user stories for the release, break down stories into tasks, plan the release, develop, integrate, and test the software, release the software, evaluate the system.

Question 7

What is the drawback of extreme programming?

Answer 7

It has a technical focus and is not easy to integrate with management practice at most organizations. Thus, extreme programming is not widely used but some practices from it are adopted.

Question 8

What is a user story?

Answer 8

A user story is a representation of a user requirement for a particular part of the software. They are written on cards and broken down into implementation tasks.

Question 9

What is refactoring and why is it important?

Answer 9

Refactoring is the process of making constant improvements to code throughout the development process. It is important because it helps to make changes easier when they need to be implemented.

Question 10

How is refactoring done?

Answer 10

The programming team looks for any improvements that can be made within the code and implement them even if there is no immediate reason for it. In doing this, the code becomes much more understandable

Question 11

What is test-first development?

Answer 11

Tests are created along with the rest of the software, not after it has been completed. Tests are made for every change that is made to the software product.

Question 12

What is the drawback of test first development?

Answer 12

Since the test cases and test automation are created alongside the software they must pass the same quality control tests as the rest of the software even though they won’t be released.

Question 13

What is test automation and why is it useful?

Answer 13

Test automation is when the tests are written as executable components before the task is implemented. This is useful because it means whenever we finish implementing a particular piece of the software we have many test cases ready to go.

Question 14

What is pair programming?

Answer 14

Programmers literally working in pairs at the same machine to develop the software.

Question 15

Why is pair programming useful?

Answer 15

Helps with spreading knowledge quickly across the team, serves as an informal review since more than one person is looking at the code, and encourages refactoring since all of the team members will benefit

Question 16

How are pairs created in pair programming?

Answer 16

They are created dynamically so every programmer works with every other programmer at some point

Question 17

What is scrum?

Answer 17

Scrum is an agile methodology with a focus on project management.

Question 18

What type of environment must a scrum master foster?

Answer 18

An environment where a product owner orders the work for a problem into a product backlog, the scrum team turns a selection of the work into an increment of value for the sprint, and the scrum team and stakeholders inspect the results and adjust for next sprint.

Question 19

What is a scrum team?

Answer 19

A self-organizing group of developers usually 3-9 people

Question 20

What is a potentially shippable product increment?

Answer 20

The software increment delivered from a sprint that should be up to quality to be immediately shipped.

Question 21

What is the product backlog?

Answer 21

A list of to-do items for the project that the scrum team must complete. The priority of each item is decided by the product owner

Question 22

What is a scrum meeting?

Answer 22

A daily meeting where the scrum team reviews what has been done and prioritizes work to be done that day.

Question 23

What is a scrum master?

Answer 23

A project manager for a scrum team. Their job is to ensure that the scrum process is being followed and to act as a liaison between the scrum team and the rest of the company

Question 24

What is a sprint?

Answer 24

A single development iteration used in scrum. Usually around 2-4 weeks

Question 25

What is velocity?

Answer 25

The amount of work that is done within a period of time. Could be based on story points or person hours

Question 26

What are the activities and the inputs/outputs of a sprint cycle?

Answer 26

Activities: review work to be done, select items, plan the sprint, do the sprint, scrum meeting, review the sprint
Inputs/outputs: Product backlog, sprint backlog, potentially shippable software

Question 27

How do you calculate sprint velocity?

Answer 27

Take the average number of story points completed per sprint

Question 28

How are the number of story points per user story decided?

Answer 28

Based on previous experience, they are assigned a number of story points based on the complexity of the task. The scale they are based on may be linear but most common is Fibonacci

Question 29

What is planning poker?

Answer 29

A “game” to assign story points. Each member of the team is given cards with various numbers and symbols. They vote on how many story points a user story should get using the number cards. They can also use the question mark card if they need more information to do a certain user story or it can be given infinity which means it is too complex to implement

Question 30

What are the advantages of scrum methodology?

Answer 30

1. Larger projects are broken down into more manageable chunks
2. The approach ensures efficient use of client time and money
3. The development team and client work closer together and receive more feedback
4. It allows for increased flexibility

Question 31

What is kanban?

Answer 31

An agile software development practice based on visual project management to track tasks and reduce inefficiencies

Question 32

How does kanban differ from scrum?

Answer 32

Scrum is a discrete process whereas kanban is a continuous process. What this means is that scrum work is organized into sprints of defined length where work is selected and added to a sprint backlog to complete. In kanban, user stories are continually being moved from the backlog, to in progress, to complete, until the project is finished.

Question 33

Why is it difficult to scale up agile methods?

Answer 33

Agile works best with small, co-located teams so when the teams get much larger and spread out it is difficult to maintain the level of communication agile requires.

Question 34

Why can the informality of agile be a bad thing?

Answer 34

Because many companies are strictly regulated and organized. They do their business using unambiguous contracts. This contract style is not available in agile as there is not guarantee at the start of the project what exact work will be done.

Question 35

What are the practical problems with agile?

Answer 35

Many large companies have employees spread out all over the world so it may be difficult to get co-located teams. Additionally, since agile work is done in sprints, it is difficult to translate this to the maintenance phase which occurs over a period of years with unpredictable workload

Question 36

What are some system issues to consider when deciding on agile or plan-driven process?

Answer 36

1. Consider the size of the system: large systems are better suited for plan-based as they require more documentation and organization. Small systems are good for agile as agile requires small teams.
2. Consider the type of system being developed: Complicated systems that require a lot of analysis are better for plan-driven models while less complex systems are better for agile.
3. Consider the expected system lifetime: longer system lifetimes are better for plan-driven models because the lasting documentation will help when team members inevitably leave the project.
4. Consider whether or not the system is externally regulated: if the system is regulated by an outside body like a government, there may be requirements for documentation and testing that must be followed during development

Question 37

What are some people issues to consider when deciding on agile or plan-driven process?

Answer 37

1. Consider how good the developers on the team are: it takes more skill to translate requirements into code when there is not detailed documentation to go off of. So, more skilled teams can use agile easier
2. Consider how the team is organized: if the team is no co-located, more documentation may be required to communicate intentions
3. Consider the support technologies required: Since there is not as much design documentation in agile, more support software is needed to visualize the process and perform program analysis. With plan-driven models, more support software is needed for the planning phase where documentation and diagrams must be produced.

Question 38

What are some organizational issues to consider when deciding on agile or plan-driven process?

Answer 38

1. Consider if heavy documentation is a common organizational practice: If the organization is already in the habit of producing detailed documentation they may want to stick with a plan-driven approach
2. Consider if customer representatives will be available: If there is no one to provide feedback on the product and make clarifications, the iterative nature of agile will not work well. Instead, documentation should be planned and produced at the very beginning so there are no ambiguities

Question 39

What is the difference between the product backlog and the sprint backlog?

Answer 39

A product backlog is the list of all user stories that need to be completed for the project as a whole along with their priority ranking and number of story points. A sprint backlog is a subset of tasks from the product backlog that have been selected to be completed during the current sprint.

Question 40

What are some drawbacks of test-first development?

Answer 40

It can be time consuming. Instead of focusing just on development you must also focus on making the test cases and automation. If changes are made later on, the changes must be made both in the code and the tests. More time is spent evaluating the tests as they need to go through the same checks as the rest of the code.

Question 41

Why is scrum preferred in organizations over extreme programming?

Answer 41

Extreme programming gets development done fast but it is messy as there is no project management being done like there is with scrum.