Agile Software Engineering Overview

Agile Software Engineering

• Agile software engineering is a set of methods to develop software
• Managers need information to assess cost, time, and release date
• Plan-driven development provides long-term planning, but in practice short-term plans are more reliable
• XP (Extreme Programming) plans incrementally during daily meetings
• XP promotes informal planning with minimal documentation and no designated project manager
• Scrum is a management approach that results from the informal approach
• Scrum is focused on a set of technical practices (10 of them)
• Scrum provides a framework for agile project organization with additional designated individuals (ScrumMaster and Product Owner) to act as an interface between the development team and the organization.
• Scrum and XP can compensate each other
• Scrum was first used in a 1986 paper titled "The New Product Development Game"
• The term, scrum, is borrowed from rugby where 'scrum' refers to a formation of players; it emphasizes teamwork
• The software product undergoing development by the Scrum team is called the product.
• A product owner takes the lead in refining features, reviewing work, testing the product, and deciding on whether to release a "Potentially shippable product increment"
• A backlog is a to-do list of bugs, features, and product improvements. The Scrum team items that have not been completed
• The Scrum team is a small (5-8 people) self-organizing team
• Sprints are short periods (2-4 weeks) in which product increments are developed
• A daily Scrum is a meeting to discuss progress and daily work.
• A ScrumMaster guides the team in the effective use of Scrum (facilitates how to properly use Scrum )
• A potentially shippable product increment is the output of a sprint with high enough quality for customer use (not necessarily the completed product)
• A minimum viable product (MVP) is a "potentially shippable product increment" that is marketable and ready for customer use. This has enough features to be of value to most customers, but may be less mature than a complete product
• "Velocity" is an estimate of how much work a team can complete in a single sprint.
• A sprint backlog is a list of tasks assigned to complete during a sprint, based on prioritized items on the product backlog.
• The sprint process is iterative.
  • Select PBI's for a sprint
  • Work on PBIs in a sprint
  • Complete sprint
  • Re-assess
• A sprint retrospective is a meeting at the end of a sprint to review what went well, what didn't, and how to improve for the next sprint
• Product backlogs are prioritized items (PBIs) for product development.
• PBIs are described in broad terms for initial estimates, with details added later.
• User stories can be used to describe PBIs.
• The estimation process can use story points or elapsed time (person-days/person-hours)
• Planning poker is a team-based estimation approach
• Velocity helps estimate how many PBIs fit into a sprint.
• Agile activities used with scrum often include test automation and continuous integration
• Sprint review (sprint retrospective), last meeting to review whether or not the sprint has met its goal, discuss problems, and reflect on improvements.
• The product owner decides whether the sprint goal was achieved.
• The Code Completeness Checklist verifies if the code meets the development standards and if required testing and integration was performed.
• External interactions are defined as interactions between team members and people outside the team.
• Interactions should be focused on development, so the ScrumMaster and Product Owner commonly handle external interactions with the company management and other stakeholders
• Project management with agile teams often involves the ScrumMaster reporting on project progress to company management.
• The ScrumMaster often takes on project management responsibilities within the team.