Exercises: Applied Agile Development

Why Rapid Delivery Matters More Than Detailed Functionality

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The diagram below illustrates the relationship between a changing business environment and software delivery speed.

Which of the following best explains why rapid delivery and deployment of new systems is often more important to businesses than the detailed functionality of those systems?

Because customers always prefer simple systems with fewer features

Because rapid delivery reduces the number of software engineers required on a project

Because in a rapidly changing environment, a system delivered quickly — even with limited functionality — allows a business to respond to new opportunities and competitive pressures before they disappear; a fully featured system delivered late may be outdated and effectively useless

Because businesses prefer incomplete systems that can be built cheaply

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Agile Principles — Which Accelerate Development and Deployment

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Agile methods are built on five core principles. Which of the following principles directly contribute to accelerated development and deployment of software? Select all that apply.

Maintain simplicity — eliminating unnecessary complexity from both the software and the process reduces development time and speeds delivery

Customer involvement — rapid feedback on each increment means problems are detected early, reducing costly late-stage rework that would slow delivery

Embrace change — designing the system to accommodate change avoids the expensive redesign cycles that delay delivery when requirements evolve

Incremental delivery — the software is developed and delivered in small, frequent increments, providing value to the customer quickly rather than waiting for a complete system

People not process — recognising and exploiting team members' skills without prescriptive overhead allows the team to work at its natural pace without bureaucratic delays

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How Agile Minimises Delays from Changing Requirements

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One major cause of delay in conventional software development is how the process handles changing requirements. How do agile methods specifically address this to accelerate deployment?

Agile methods interleave specification, development and validation — requirements and design evolve together so that when requirements change, only the current increment needs rework rather than the entire system specification and design

Agile methods use automated code generation to instantly incorporate requirement changes without manual rework

Agile methods freeze requirements at the start to prevent changes from occurring

Agile methods outsource requirements changes to the customer, removing them from the critical path

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When to Recommend Against Using an Agile Method

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Agile methods are not appropriate for every software development situation. Which of the following are valid reasons to recommend against using an agile method? Select all that apply.

The customer is unable or unwilling to be closely involved throughout the development process

The system is safety-critical and requires complete upfront analysis of all requirements to check for interactions that may compromise safety or security

The organisation has bureaucratic quality procedures and standards that are incompatible with agile's informal, documentation-light approach

The development team is large and distributed, making the informal communication that agile depends on impractical

The system must be approved by an external regulator, such as a certification authority, which requires detailed documentation as part of the safety case

The requirements are well understood and unlikely to change, making an incremental discovery approach unnecessary

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User Stories as Requirements — Advantages and Disadvantages

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Statements

×Stories are understandable to customers and users without technical knowledge, making communication and prioritisation straightforward

×Stories are easy to change or discard when requirements evolve — only the relevant story card and its tasks are updated

×Stories capture scenarios the customer can relate to, making it easy to generate acceptance tests from them

×Stories are too informal and high-level to capture non-functional requirements such as performance, security, or reliability

×A single story may not capture all the dependencies and interactions between requirements, making it hard to reason about the system as a whole

×Stories can be ambiguous — without a detailed requirements document, different team members may implement the same story differently

Advantage

Disadvantage

In extreme programming, user requirements are expressed as user stories — short, scenario-based descriptions written on story cards, each capturing a specific user need. The development team then breaks each story into implementation tasks. Classify each statement as an advantage or a disadvantage of this approach to requirements description.

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User Stories — Who Decides What Goes in a Release?

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In XP, once story cards have been developed and the development team has broken them into tasks and estimated the effort required, a key decision must be made about which stories to implement in the next release. Who makes this decision and on what basis?

The customer prioritises the stories, choosing those that can deliver useful business support and that can be implemented in the available time — typically those deliverable in about two weeks

The project manager selects stories based on technical complexity, implementing the easiest ones first

An external steering committee reviews all story cards and selects stories based on regulatory compliance requirements

The development team selects stories based on whichever tasks they estimate will take the least time

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How Test-First Development Improves Requirements Understanding

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Test-first development requires programmers to write automated tests for a piece of functionality before writing the code that implements it. How does this practice help programmers develop a better understanding of the system requirements?

Writing tests first automatically validates that the requirements are correct and complete before development starts

Writing the test first allows programmers to skip reading the requirements document entirely

Writing the test first forces programmers to thoroughly understand the specification so they can define the expected behaviour — this process exposes ambiguities and omissions in the requirements before implementation begins, clarifying what the system must do

Writing tests first generates a formal mathematical proof that the requirements are consistent

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Potential Difficulties with Test-First Development

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Although test-first development is a powerful innovation, it faces potential difficulties in practice. Which of the following are recognised difficulties? Select all that apply.

Automated test frameworks are too expensive for most organisations to afford

It is difficult to judge the completeness of a test set — crucial parts of the system may not be executed by the tests and so remain untested despite a large number of tests existing

Some functionality is difficult to test incrementally — for example, in a complex user interface it is often difficult to write unit tests for the display logic and workflow between screens

Test-first development always slows delivery so dramatically that it is impractical for commercial projects

Programmers sometimes take shortcuts when writing tests — for example writing incomplete tests that do not check all possible exceptions — because they prefer programming to testing

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Why Pair Programming Productivity Can Match Two Individual Programmers

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You might expect that two programmers working in a pair would only produce half as much code as two programmers working independently. Which of the following reasons help explain why pair programming productivity can be comparable to — rather than half of — two people working alone? Select all that apply.

Pair programmers write less code overall — they avoid over-engineering because two perspectives challenge unnecessary complexity

Pair programming always produces code that runs twice as fast as individually written code

Working in a pair provides social motivation and accountability, reducing the risk of developers becoming distracted or losing focus

Pairs discuss the software design before development and so probably have fewer false starts and less rework than individual programmers who start coding without discussion

The continuous sharing of knowledge during pair programming reduces the time spent looking up documentation or asking colleagues for help

The informal code review that occurs naturally in pair programming catches errors early, meaning less time is spent repairing bugs discovered during later testing phases

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Scrum vs Plan-driven Project Management — Four Dimensions

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To complete the line match

Click on an item in the first group
Click on an item in the second group
To delete a match, double click on a line

Dimension

Planning the allocation of people to projects

Estimating the cost of projects

Maintaining team cohesion

Managing changes in project team membership

How Scrum differs

The team self-organises each sprint — the Scrum master facilitates but does not assign tasks top-down; the whole team decides how to do the work

Scrum uses time-based contracts where cost is estimated iteratively based on the evolving product backlog and sprint velocity, rather than fixed upfront from a complete specification

Daily stand-up meetings give the whole team visibility of progress, problems, and plans — everyone knows what is going on, enabling short-term replanning without top-down direction

Scrum is more vulnerable to team membership changes because it relies on implicit shared knowledge built up over sprints — new members take time to build the same understanding

The table below compares Scrum and conventional plan-driven approaches across four project management dimensions.

Dimension	Plan-driven	Scrum
Planning allocation of people	Assigned per stage	Team self-organises per sprint
Estimating project cost	Fixed contract / schedule	Time-based, evolves per backlog
Maintaining team cohesion	Roles formally assigned	Daily stand-ups, backlog visibility
Managing team membership changes	Re-plan, reassign tasks	Harder — relies on implicit knowledge

For each of the four dimensions, which statement correctly describes how Scrum differs from a conventional plan-driven approach?

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Development Strategies for Critical Software — Advantages and Disadvantages

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Statements

×Produces detailed documentation satisfying regulatory and certification authority requirements — essential for safety-critical systems

×Requirements gathered from engineers and regulators are likely to be stable and complete — reducing the risk of late-stage surprises

×Inflexible to requirements changes discovered during development — rework is expensive once the full specification is committed

×Allows stakeholders to interact with a working prototype and refine requirements before committing to final implementation — reduces risk of building the wrong system

×Two-phase development (prototype then final implementation) is expensive and time-consuming

×Allows experienced software engineers and users to validate functional requirements through prototyping before formal development

×Agile approach works well only when a customer can be closely involved — in a critical system with regulatory stakeholders this involvement is hard to sustain

×Informal documentation inherent in agile may be insufficient to satisfy the certification authority requirements for safety-critical software

Strategy A (plan-driven)

Strategy B (prototype then redevelop)

Strategy C (agile with on-site user)

A software manager is responsible for developing a critical software design support tool that translates software requirements into a formal software specification. The tool must meet rigorous correctness standards. Three development strategies are under consideration, as shown in the diagram below.

Classify each advantage or disadvantage under the correct strategy.

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Preventing a Customer Representative from 'Going Native'

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A known risk of having a customer representative embedded closely with an agile development team is that they may 'go native' — adopting the outlook of the development team and losing sight of the needs of their user colleagues. Which of the following approaches could help prevent this problem? Select all that apply.

Establish a user panel or advisory group that the customer representative consults before prioritising requirements — providing a structured channel for wider user input beyond the representative's own viewpoint

Require the customer representative to attend regular meetings with end-user colleagues outside the development team to maintain their user perspective and report back on user priorities

Have the customer representative only communicate with the team through written formal documents to prevent informal socialisation with developers

Prevent the customer representative from attending any team stand-up meetings to maintain their independence

Rotate the customer representative role periodically — cycling different users into the team so no single individual becomes overly integrated with the development culture

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Remote Work Policy and Agile Development — Conflicts and Solutions

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A company decides to close several offices and support staff to work from home to reduce costs and environmental impact. However, the company's software development teams use agile methods that rely on close team working and pair programming. Which of the following correctly identifies the difficulties this policy creates for agile development AND suggests a valid approach to address them?

The main difficulty is that remote workers cannot access the organisation's servers — this can be resolved by purchasing more powerful laptops for all staff

No difficulty arises — agile methods are fully compatible with remote working because all communication can be handled through email

The main difficulty is that agile methods require physical whiteboards — this can be solved by shipping whiteboards to all home offices

The main difficulty is that pair programming and daily stand-up meetings require physical co-location for effective informal communication — these can be partially addressed using video conferencing for stand-ups, screen-sharing tools for remote pair programming, and collaboration platforms such as instant messaging, wikis, and shared code repositories to maintain team cohesion

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Why Rapid Delivery Matters More Than Detailed Functionality

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Explanation

Agile Principles — Which Accelerate Development and Deployment

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Explanation

How Agile Minimises Delays from Changing Requirements

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Explanation

When to Recommend Against Using an Agile Method

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User Stories as Requirements — Advantages and Disadvantages

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User Stories — Who Decides What Goes in a Release?

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How Test-First Development Improves Requirements Understanding

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Potential Difficulties with Test-First Development

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Why Pair Programming Productivity Can Match Two Individual Programmers

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Scrum vs Plan-driven Project Management — Four Dimensions

Dimension

How Scrum differs

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Development Strategies for Critical Software — Advantages and Disadvantages

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Preventing a Customer Representative from 'Going Native'

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Remote Work Policy and Agile Development — Conflicts and Solutions

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