Web Application Development — #4: Terminologies, Practices, and Tools

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This is part of the Web Application Development — An Introductory Course series.

Agile Software Development

History: The Waterfall model

For most of its history, the software development communities followed the Waterfall Development Model which is a sequential process of distinct stages, each must finish before the next stage can begin.

The Waterfall Model — Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waterfall_model_%281%29.svg

The Waterfall model is a structured approach emphasizing requirement collection, analysis, and software design. It is however not flexible enough in today’s fast-changing environment in which requirements, user needs, and technologies change every few months, even weeks.

Agile Development Model

Came the agile development model where:

[Individuals and interactions] over processes and tools
[Working software] over comprehensive documentation
[Customer collaboration] over contract negotiation
[Responding to change] over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more

— https://agilemanifesto.org

Guided by the above values from the Agile Manifesto, the Agile development model has taken over the software development community. Even though the exact practice of each agile development team may differ, they all share the following characteristics:

• Iterative, incremental, and evolutionary: each development project comprises multiple iterations, and each has a small, deliverable scope which may be a new feature or an improvement of earlier features. Changes are considered and accommodated during these iterations as and when they occur.

• Frequent and open communication: Agile practices emphasize frequent communication among members of the development team and between the team and business users (or their representatives). The preference is face-to-face communication and thus co-location of users and the team.

• Very short feedback loop and adaptation cycle: Each iteration lasts one or a few weeks rather than months or years as in the case of the waterfall model. That enables fast and early feedback and better response to changes. The Agile development team conduct short daily stand-up where each team member updates the team about his/her progress, plan for the day, and if there is any blocker for their tasks.

• Quality focus: Agile team adopts modern practices that automate software testing, continuous integration, continuous deployment… After all, working software is the true measure of success.

Keeping Daily Stand-up short — source: https://medium.com/@stevoscript/why-your-team-should-try-asynchronous-daily-stand-ups-87f1b809e5c8

The two popular Agile methodologies are Scrum and Kanban. In practice, teams often tweak the prescribed methodologies guidelines to fit their constraints and preferences. Some incorporate other techniques such as Story point, BDD, TDD, Pair programming, CI/CD, DevOps, Burn-Down, Velocity, etc… into their agile working model.

Composition of a Development Team

Developers

Developers are the people who write codes. They have many names (such as programmer, coder, dev, and software engineer) and can specialize in one or multiple domains (such as database, backend, web, mobile, and DevOps). Those that reach expert level can perform design and architect tasks and thus carry the architect job title.

Testers

Testers are also known as Quality analysts or just QA. They are the people who validate the written codes (at component, service levels, or on a working software) against established functional and non-functional requirements.

The validation can be manual, performed by human hand, mouse clicks, and eyes. This is how most software testings have been performed, until recently.

Or it can be automated by special test automation software. In this aspect, the testers also write codes to describe their test scenarios. This blurs the lines between developer and tester.

Product Managers

Product Managers are the people who represent users and define the product’s features that the team is going to develop. They also prioritize the list of features, often broken down into smaller units called stories, against the team’s resources, availability, and other types of constraints (e.g. market and regulation constraints, and organization directives).

Project Manager

A development team usually has only 1 project manager who helps the team with project activities (e.g. project planning, status tracking) and keeps the project going (e.g. removing blockers, identifying and managing risk affecting project delivery).

Scrum methodology, although there is no project manager, defines a Scrum Master role which is very similar to that of a traditional project manager. The planning and status tracking, however, is part of the Product Manager’s responsibilities.

Chrome

We need Chrome to actually test and debug the web application we are about to develop.

We especially need Chrome’s developer tools to debug the codes.

Conclusion

We have gone through the basics of Agile software development, learned a few terms, known a few job roles, and familiarized ourselves with a few tools which we will use in future lessons.

In the next lesson, we will start with some actual coding by practising the basics of HTML and CSS.

Previous: Web Application Development — #3: Technologies Behind a Web Application
Next: Frontend Development: HTML, CSS, Responsive layout, Javascript (Coming Soon)

For Content and Index, visit Web Application Development — An Introductory course