Rapid Application Development

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Rapid Application Development

• Rad.ppt

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Overivew

• What is RAD?
• What are the four pillars of Rapid Development?
• Efficient Development
• Schedule-oriented practices

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What is RAD?

• Schedule-oriented set of effective practices
• RAD is used when project requires development
  speed
• There are 3 types of schedule-oriented practices
• Speed-oriented practices
• Schedule-Risk-Oriented Practices
• Visibility-Oriented practices

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Schedule-Oriented Practices

• Speed-oriented practices
• faster product delivery
• Schedule-Risk-oriented practices
• avoidance of schedule overruns
• Visibility oriented practices
• keep the user from thinking youre not doing
  anything

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RAD Strategy

• 1. Avoid classic mistakes
• 2. Apply development fundamentals
• 3. Manage risks to avoid catastrophic setbacks
• 4. Apply schedule-oriented practices, which are
  ..?

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4 pillars of Rapid Development
BEST Possible Schedule
Classic- Mistake Avoidance
Development Fundamentals
Risk Management
Schedule- Oriented Practices
Efficient Development
Special thanks to Dr. Soe for developing this and
the next slide
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4 dimensions of development speedWhat you
canleverage
People
Product
Process
Technology
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IDENTIFY TWO ATTRIBUTES OF EACH DIMENSION
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Leveraging People (Boehm, 1981)

• Selection / recruitment Get the top talent -
  fewer better people people are the source of
  your competitive advantage
• Match people jobs - skills motivation
• Career development - help people move ahead
• Team balance - team members complement
  harmonize with each other
• Misfit elimination - replace problem people ASAP
  (personality conflicts, free riders, etc.)

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Leveraging Process

• Avoiding rework
• Quality assurance - build quality in from start -
  how?
• Development fundamentals
• Standard software engineering practices
• Risk Management - What risks?
• Lifecycle planning suited to the project - What
  are the key lifecycle planning strategies?
• Customer orientation is a MUST, always!

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Leveraging Product

• Product size
• The bigger the product the longer it takes
• Appropriate feature set
• Product characteristics
• Products with high goals for performance, memory
  use, robustness reliability will take longer to
  develop
• Trade-offs between features and development speed

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Leveraging Technology

• Language choice
• Other kinds of technology choices that
• increase development speed
• Product quality
• Technologies depend on nature of product

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Leveraging Process

• Robust design planning helps avoid rework
• Quality assurance - build quality in from the
  beginning by focusing on it at every stage
• Use standard software-engineering practices
• Manage risks
• Focus resources to contribute to productivity
• Lifecycle planning suited to project
• Customer orientation

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Fast Development Approaches

• Average practice (average cost, schedule,
  product)
• Efficient development (balance cost, schedule and
  functionality of the product -- better than
  average alternative)
• Efficient development best schedule (enhanced
  schedule, better cost and functionality)
• speed-oriented vs. schedule-risk oriented vs
  visability-oriented
• All-out development (fastest schedule, BUT brings
  increased risk and/or reductions in product
  quality and/or cost)

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Efficient Development

• Means establishing first 3 pillars of Best
  Possible Schedule Structure, which are?
• 1 ____________________
• 2 ____________________
• 3 ____________________
• Optimize
• Cost
• Schedule
• Product characteristics

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Once Efficient Development is Achieved

• Then tilt toward the goals beyond
• for all-out Rapid Development (fastest speed)-
• brings increased risk and/or reductions in
  product quality and/or cost
• e.g. add more people to decrease schedule
• for fewest defects
• for maximum user satisfaction
• for lowest development costs

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Avoid Class Mistakes

• Even if you use modern programming practices
• mistakes will lower your productivity
• One really big mistake will trap you into
• SLOW APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT!
• Case 3.1 Giga-Quote Program. Prepare to discuss
  next time. Identify all the mistakes!

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Classic People Mistakes

• Undermine motivation
• Weak personnel
• Uncontrolled problem employees
• Heroics - promoting can-do attitudes
• Adding people to a late project
• Noisy, crowded offices

• Friction between developers customers
• Unrealistic expectations - project time reduction
  
• Lack -of sponsorship
• -of stakeholder buy-in
• -of user input
• Politicsgtsubstance
• Wishful thinking

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Classic Process Mistakes

• Overly optimistic schedules
• Insufficient risk management
• Contractor failure
• Insufficient planning
• Abandoning planning under pressure
• Wasted time during fuzzy front end

• Shortchanged upstream activities (design, etc.)
  Inadequate design
• Shortchanged QA
• Insufficient management controls
• Premature convergence
• Forgetting tasks
• Plan to catch up later
• Code-like-hell programming

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Classic Product Mistakes

• Requirements gold-plating
• making the system complex
• Feature Creep
• Developer gold-plating
• Push-me Pull-me negotiation -- manager
  negotiates shorter time frame then adds to
  project requirements
• Research oriented development

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Classic Technology Mistakes

• Silver Bullet Syndrome
• Overestimated savings from new tools or methods
• Switching tools in middle of the project

• Lack of automated source-code control
  (overwriting each others work)

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Review of Software Development Fundamentals

• Management fundamentals
• Estimation scheduling
• Planning
• Tracking
• Measurement

• Technical fundamentals
• Requirements management
• Design before coding
• Construction
• Software configuration management

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Review of Software Development Fundamentals

• Technical reviews
• Design reviews
• Walkthroughs
• Code reviews or reading
• Code inspections
• Error-prone modules
• Testing
• Following the requirements

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Levels of Risk Management for Which You Can
Strive

• Crisis management
• Fix on failure
• Risk mitigation
• Prevention
• Elimination of root causes
• The last two are the most important!

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Risk Management (Boehm, 1989)
Risk Identification Risk Analysis Risk
Prioritization
Risk Assessment
Risk Management
Risk-Management Planning Risk Resolution Risk
Monitoring
Risk Control
How do you do this?
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Risk Assessment

• Risk identification - list of potential risks to
  project schedule
• Risk analysis - estimation of risk probabilities
• Risk prioritization - list of risks by impact

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Risk Control

• Risk-management planning -- plan for dealing
  with each risk
• Risk resolution - for each risk
• Risk monitoring of progress toward resolving each
  risk item

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Most Common Schedule Risks (Review Table 5-3)

• Feature creep
• Requirements or developer gold-plating
• Shortchanged quality
• Overly optimistic schedules
• Inadequate design
• Silver-bullet syndrome

• Research-oriented development
• Weak personnel
• Contractor failure
• Friction between developers customers

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Risk Analysis

• Determine the risk exposure of each risk
• Risk exposure (weeks) Probability of loss ()
  size of loss (weeks)
• Estimate size of loss per schedule
• Have team estimate probability
• The size of the expected overrun (all the
  probable losses) overall risk level
• Do risk management plans, then recompute risk
  exposure add to your schedule

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Risk Prioritization

• Sort risks in order of risk exposure
• Fix the 80 that will yield the biggest results

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Risk Control

• Risk management planning - high-priority risks
• Risk Resolution
• Avoid the risk
• Transfer the risk to another part of system
• Buy information about the risk (investigate)
• Eliminate the root causes of the risk
• Assume the risk (especially if small
  consequences)
• Control the risk (extra resources, planning)
• Remember the risk for future projects

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Means of controlling Risks

• Read review Tables 5-6 5-7
• Create a Top-10 Risks list for future projects
• Include post-mortems
• Appoint a risk officer
• Dont schedule so aggressively that the project
  is a desperate gamble

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Plan for our JAD 1

• Issues to consider
• Classic mistake avoidance
• Development fundamentals
• Risk management
• Schedule oriented practices
• What do we need to plan? (next class session)
• Agenda with Times order of presentations
• JAD leadership
• Process
• Deliverables

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• Assignment of Sub-Projects
• Review JAD 1 requirements