Agile Software Development - Case Study Example

Agile Software Development Group Report Group 4 Introduction This paper entails a reflection on an assignment on Attendance Monitoring System given to be worked on in a group of 6 students with different roles to play. The group also has a customer (a lecturer) to whom the customer representative of the group plans visits. The assignment entailed developing a piece of software to be designed through agile techniques. The proposed system’s objective is to help in monitoring the attendance of students and generate regular reports for attendance at program, module or student level. The program has three users, the lecturer, the administrator and the program leader, with each of them having different permission levels in the system. The lecturer submits the information on the module register and updates the attendance details in the system. Reflection on the Group Work The group was able to analyze and gather various sets of information on agile development process so as to use its techniques in developing the Student Attendance Monitoring System. The group got information from lecture notes, books and online sources about the Agile Development process. The group was able to come to an agreement that the system offers a framework that is lightweight, entailing a collection of development methodologies which are iterative used by development teams. From the information that the group gathered, it was clear that agile development software delivers working software of high-quality in the functionality of business value. This is the kind of software that the group needed in the development of the monitoring system. Another technique that the group was looking out to in the agile development process was its combination of methodologies such as question-and-answer (QA), project management, and even in engineering practices, together in a way that will help the agile development team through processes of managing, planning and delivery of the software. Every member of the group had a role to play, assigned by the group leader. With the combination of all the roles, the group saw the realization of its objective on the assignment. The members gathered information from sources mentioned earlier. The group was able to compile the information that Agile’s most popular methodologies include the extreme programming methodology (XP), Scrum, Kanban and hybrid methodologies. The group noted that even though these software methods have approaches that are specific and unique to each of them, they have the same core values and share a similar vision stated in the agile manifesto (Holcombe 2008). During the development process, the group employed some of the XP practices. The practices were pair programming, system metaphor, test first development, small release, and continuous integration and collective ownership. All the group members knew how the system works since it was the group itself which created its own system metaphor and have a shared vocabulary. The group widely used pair programming even showing in the plan who is working with who for each component. Unit tests and acceptance tests for all system components were first created before writing any code, for it to ensure that everything that the group writes complies with its requirements. The group made small releases which the customer saw and gave helpful feedback on the improvement of the project. Through the work done by the team members, there is expression of the XP programming methodology. The methodology promotes high involvement of the customer, continuous testing, quick loops of feedback, planning continuously, and close teamwork so as to give working software in every one to three weeks. In this programming methodology, the customer has a close working with the team to prioritize and define discreet unit of functionality referred to as “User Stories”. The group gathered the user stories and through the customer representative, showed them to the customer. This allowed the team to have a better understanding of their system and prioritize the requirements. The group created an acceptance test for each user story, to help test the system that they were creating. The system has three users: lecturer, programme leader, and administrator. The admin panel will allow viewing, adding and removing modules, students and lecturers from the system. The lecturer will be able to indicate which students were present in the class, as well as generate reports with summary percentages for his modules using the system interface. The program leader shall be able to generate attendance reports for the whole program, for each module and every student in specific period, making it possible to get the average, minimum and maximum attendance for every instance in given period. In the system design there is a database of users, where each user is a lecturer, administrator or a program leader, as well as a table in the database with information that allows generating reports. Each user will have different privileges to access and generate specific reports. Group Structure and Roles of team members This is how the group role structure looked like: the members chose the coach who assigned roles for the other members based on their skills set. Each member was a programmer, in addition to the role assigned. The roles were: Coach (Dan), Customer Representative (Alex F.), Doomsayer (Alex T. ensured that everyone knew the risks involved), Tracker (Adel, monitored the progress of programmers, took action when anyone went off track) and testing, implementation and running functional tests, done by Polly and Paul. Looking at these roles which the members were each allocated, their full participation and excellent delivery was going to be an assurance that the work of the group was going to be successful. The roles were allocated in line with the requirements as per the XP techniques. The customer representative ensured that meetings with the customer were scheduled and executed. In this manner, the group was able to get the customer’s valuable feedback. The customer, who is a lecturer, gave the group the critical help that they needed for exploration, planning and doing the acceptance test for the project. It was thus necessary for all the members of the group to be present during these kinds of meetings with the customer. The team leader ensured that all programming was done in pairs during the weekly development workshops. Members paired with each other throughout the development process. In line with XP methodology, the group saw it wise to compliment each task with a unit test. The group wrote the unit test first, and then ran it before its implementation. The group members Polly and Paul ensured that these tests were carried out appropriately before being implemented. The team collectively owned the code; this was enhanced through the pair programming procedure. Comparison of Scrum development methodology to XP Scrum is another type of agile development software as mentioned earlier. It produces shippable software that can be presented to the customer at the end of iteration. It also has the set up of the team that works closely with the product owner. This helps in the identification and prioritization of the functionality of the system in the form of a ProductBacklog. The ProductBacklog comprises the feature, non-functional requirements, and bug fixes. Scrum has been increasingly popular in the community of software. It is known for being simple, proven productivity, and also for being able to act as a wrapper for different practices in engineering which are promoted by other agile methodologies. Compared to XP, scrum has more emphasis on a project’s management side and does not give a detailed definition of engineering practice. XP specify engineering practices of software such as pair-programming, test-driven development, refactoring. The focus of scrum on the management side enables the implementation on the other projects beyond software development process. Scrum defines the framework while XP defines the engineering practice. They emphasize on different sides of software development process. A combination of both would be a considerable way of improving the system made by the group through the agile development techniques. Both XP and Scrum are methodologies of Agile development process. Both methodologies can be combined to make the best out of the development process, especially in organizations which are large, even those with more than 800people.This, therefore, make an XP – Scrum combination system perfectly suitable for schools with as many as 800 students or more. Challenges and remedies The group had some challenges during the system development process. Some of the members did not have consistent commitment to the work that the group was assigned to do. During some of the meetings with the customer and the workshop manager, some of the group members were absent, which reduced the group’s portrayal of seriousness and commitment to the process. The members, however, sent formal apology and caught up with the group’s progress in the development process. At some point, it was a challenge to manage the frequent meetings with the managers and to successfully convene all the stakeholders. The involved parties then agreed on making sacrifices even at their inconveniences, to ensure the successful completion of the project. The agile development process if driven by features. The group noticed its quality attribute of non-functionality, which were hard to place them as user stories. In conclusion, the development process done by the group was the most excellent experience of putting to practice the magnificent techniques of the Agile development. The group learnt corporate responsibility and participation throughout the project. Reference Holcombe, W. M. L. 2008. Running an agile software development project. Hoboken, N.J., Wiley. Read More