Agile Development Basics

Agile Software Development

• Agile development involves features, software requirements, user stories, and supplementary tasks like architecture definition and user documentation.

Product Owner

• A product owner is an individual or small group responsible for identifying product features, prioritizing them, and continuously reviewing the product backlog to ensure the project meets business needs.
• The product owner can be a customer, product manager, or stakeholder representative.

Scrum Terminology

• Scrum is a daily meeting that reviews progress and prioritizes work for the day.
• A ScrumMaster ensures the Scrum process is followed, guides the team, and interfaces with the company.
• A ScrumMaster is not a project manager.
• A Sprint is a development iteration, typically 2-4 weeks long.
• Velocity is an estimate of how much product backlog effort a team can cover in a single sprint.

Agile Manifesto

• The Agile manifesto values individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan.

Principles of Agile Methods

• Customer involvement is essential throughout the development process.
• The software is developed in increments with the customer specifying requirements for each increment.
• The skills of the development team should be recognized and exploited, with minimal prescriptive processes.
• The system should be designed to accommodate changes and simplicity should be maintained in both the software and development process.

Refactoring

• Refactoring involves reorganizing class hierarchies, tidying up and renaming attributes and methods, and replacing inline code with program library calls.

Test-First Development

• Testing is central to XP, with tests written after every change.
• XP testing features include test-first development, incremental test development from scenarios, user involvement, and automated test harnesses.

Test-Driven Development

• Writing tests before code clarifies requirements and ensures they are implemented correctly.
• Tests are written as programs, executed automatically, and include checks for correct execution.
• All previous and new tests are run automatically when new functionality is added.

Customer Involvement

• The customer helps develop acceptance tests for stories to be implemented in the next release.
• The customer writes tests as development proceeds.

Learn about the basics of Agile development, including product owners, feature definitions, and user stories.