Agile Software Development in practice: Experience, Tips and Tools from the Trenches of Higher Education
- 1. NERCOMP 2012 Agile Software Development in Practice: Experience, Tips and Tools from the Trenches of Higher Education Valerie Puffet-Michel ([email protected]) and Thomas Wood ([email protected]) Student Affairs Information Technology University of Connecticut 1
- 2. Who are we? Student Affairs Information Technology (SAIT) Application development team - 4 developers - 1 team lead with several hats 2
- 3. Who are our customers? • Center for Students with Disabilities • Residential Life • Office of Student Services and Advocacy • Dining Services • Career Services 3
- 4. Outline • Why write custom software? • Challenges of software development in higher education • Our secret sauce! • Walk through “The life of a feature” • What worked for us and what didn’t ... • Where do you start? 4
- 5. Why write custom software for higher education? • When you can’t always get you want (from a vendor) ... • Quality • Features • Timeliness • ... you can get what you need! • The features you need when you want them • Opportunity to design a system: software, business process, integration 5
- 6. So ... we want to develop software, but ... 6
- 7. It’s not that easy ... • In typical software projects: • Scope, resources, planning determined at start of the project ... • ... when you know the LEAST • We face: • Limited resources • Diverse demands • Everything is important (no economy!) 7
- 8. Agile 8
- 9. What values are driving us? Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. Agile Manifesto 9
- 10. Values continued 10
- 11. Our secret sauce! • Scrum: Agile Project management • Good development practices 11
- 12. Let’s walk through the life of a feature 12
- 13. Meeting with the customers We want to hire a notetaker... It takes too much time now! Can you help us? 13
- 14. Mockup 14
- 15. Clarify the story • Val & the team have a conversation, clarify the story. 15
- 16. Estimate the story • The team estimates using a card game called planning poker! 16
- 17. Identify stories and commitment! • Team commits to a group of stories that they will work on in the next 2 weeks. 17
- 18. Daily Standup • Meeting every day... 15 minutes... standing up! 18
- 19. Development in progress... 19
- 20. Conversation leads to just enough design • Story as conversation • What does it mean for a story to be “done”? • Design just enough to implement the feature 20
- 21. Source control and branching • Central source code repository • “Trunk”: always deliverable • “Branch”: private copy of the trunk 21
- 22. Tests • We believe strongly in tests. • 2x as much test code as application code • Tests make us fearless • Tests give us executable documentation • Our tests are automated and easy to run 22
- 23. Two types of tests • Unit tests • “When a notetaker is hired for a class, the notetaker should be added to the list of notetakers for the class.” • Functional tests • “Given I am viewing the schedule for a prospective notetaker, when I check the box next to a class, enter a cell phone number and click the hire button, I should see the ‘notetaker hired’ message” 23
- 24. Test Coverage • Goal is to make sure every line of code is tested. • All of the individual tests are collected in a test suite • Coverage measures which lines of code are executed while a test suite run. 24
- 25. Hire a notetaker screen 25
- 26. Tom is done! • What does it mean to be “done”? • Story is implemented • Tests pass • Coverage is good. What’s next? 26
- 27. The team reviews the code • Change is distributed to team members for review • Why code review? • shared ownership • increase quality • follow standards • cross training for free 27
- 28. Jenkins helps test the feature automatically • Jenkins is a continuous integration server. • How does it work? • When new code is committed to trunk, Jenkins runs the tests automatically, measures the coverage, and deploys the application so Val can try it out. • Goal: • Automated builds that verify quality: • Make sure we still have working software Work smarter, not harder! 28
- 29. 29
- 30. Development practices in a nutshell... • Source code control • Simple design • Automated tests • Code review • Continuous integration 30
- 31. Val accepts or rejects a story • Last quality check 31
- 32. Demo and customer feedback 32
- 33. Story is live! 33
- 34. Repeat as needed! • multiple stories (bricks) • multiple sprints (rooms) 34
- 35. Challenges we faced • Customer collaboration • Getting regular time with customers. • Getting customers to test the software. • Not having the right users in the room (e.g. students, maintenance staff) • Development practices & estimation • Deployment cost • Code review bottleneck • Difficulty estimating uncertain stories 35
- 36. What works for us? • Customer collaboration and feedback • Customer prioritizes the work, team only works on most important features. • We make change happen, flexible • We continually improve our practices. • Deliver software as we go (one brick at a time!) • Team works on one project at a time • Management support and clear priorities set by SAITOC (Student Affairs IT Oversight Committee) • We have fun and love what we do. Everyone is happy! 36
- 37. Another view on our practices • show data! 37
- 38. Where do you start? • One step at a time • Make mistakes and learn from them • Enjoy the journey ... patience. • Make it fun! 38
- 39. Acknowledgements • Our team: • Matthew Coolbeth • Matthew Desmarais • Michael Keating • SAIT 39
- 41. Learn more • the agile manifesto: http://agilemanifesto.org/ • scrum • Intro to scrum - http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/topics/new-to-agile-or-scrum • Agile Project Management with Scrum - Ken Schwaber • Jeff Sutherland's blog: http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/ • development practices • Practices of an Agile Developer - Venkat Subramanian, Handy Hunt • Extreme Programming Explained - Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres • Continuous delivery - Jez Humble, David Farley • estimation, planning and stories • Planning poker: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/topics/planning-poker • User Stories Applied: for agile software development - Mike Cohn • Agile Estimation and Planning - Mike Cohn • from traditional project management to agility • The software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility - Michelle Sliger, Stacia Broderick • Agile Project Management: creating Innovative Products - 2nd Edition - Jim Highsmith • certifications: • Scrum Master and Product Owner - Scrum alliance - http://www.scrumalliance.org/ • PMI- ACP - http://www.pmi.org/Certification/New-PMI-Agile-Certification.aspx 41
- 42. Tools • nose (www.readthedocs.org/docs/nose) - automated test framework • Jenkins (www.jenkins-ci.org) - continuous integration server • Pivotal Tracker (www.pivotaltracker.com) - agile project management • Google Code Reviews (code.google.com/p/rietveld) - code review tool • Subversion (subversion.apache.org) - version control system 42
- 43. Software stack • Debian Linux (www.debian.org) - operating system • Python (www.python.org) - programming language • Pylons (www.pylonshq.org) - web framework • SQLAlchemy (www.sqlalchemy.org) - object relational manager • Microsoft SQL Server - relational database 43