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Revision as of 02:10, 7 October 2013
This article focuses on how Rails enables ‘’’agile development practices’ and the characteristics of Rails that support specific agile methodologies.
Agile development
What is it?
Agile development is a methodology where requirements and solutions are developed based on iterative and incremental development<ref>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative_and_incremental_development</ref> through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. Using agile development methodology, a high quality software can be developed by programmers in a minimal amount of time.
Some of the process under agile development includes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. It is a conceptual framework that promotes foreseen interactions throughout the development cycle.
Why do we need it?
*Visibility through active customer involvement
- Flexibility/Agility - ability to accept changes
- Quality - testing integrated throughout the lifecycle
- Speedy delivery
- Customer satisfaction - feeling of a right product
Some well known agile development methods
Well-known agile software development methods include:
- Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD)
- Agile Modeling
- Agile Unified Process (AUP)
- Continuous integration (CI)
- Crystal Clear
- Crystal Methods
- Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)
- Extreme Programming (XP)
- Feature Driven Development (FDD)
- Graphical System Design (GSD)
- Kanban
- Lean software development
- Scrum
- Scrumban
- Story-driven modeling
- Test-driven development (TDD)
- Velocity tracking
- Software Development Rhythm
How Rails supports Agile Methodologies
Generators and Scaffolds
- The command “rails generate” uses templates to create models, controllers, views, databases, etc which helps to setup a test application.
- The scaffolding can be easily done to deploy any basic web -application, and developers can extend them to implement their functionalities. This overcomes the initial hurdle.
Ready Setup for Multi-environment
- Rails application provides development, production and testing environments with built-in configurations setup and thus is a huge time saver for an application which is required to be deployed in multiple environments.
- The built-in rails web-server has the development environment as the default environment.
- Simple deployment allows developers to have face-face client meetings and thus make instantaneous changes based on the client requirements.
Test-Driven Development
- Built in mocking and stubbing frameworks are available which assists “how to write code”. This follows a red, green and refactor which is an important aspect of agile development.
- RSpec is one of the famous testing framework tools used with rails.
- Other testing tools can also be swapped in.
Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY)
- Repeated code is written in helpers and libraries, making a single destination and thus updations become simpler by updating at just one place.
- Partials are a way of rendering repeated HTML code. Rails understand a file which starts with an underscore, say, _partial.html as a partial to be included in the shared html file which renders it.
Dependency Management
- Rails acts more than a web framework by providing the necessary utility and support tools and adding dependencies to individual projects in a jiffy using the “bundler”.
- This bundler installs all the relevant gem files and also can be updated when more dependencies are added. No need to search for packages or jars.
Easy Migration
- Rails helps you to keep easy track of database changes with the help of Migration Objects. It gives the flexibility to rollback and update.
- It also allows you to maintain various versions of database for the multi-environment. On running rake db::migrate, the desired database is migrated and deployed with the working rails server.
- New technologies such as Coffeescript can also be easily embedded by installing the relevant gems thus adapting to the changing technology.
Assets Pipeline
- The assets pipeline is a new feature embedded in rails ( which is now extracted into sprockets-rails gem), concatenates and compresses javascript and css files.
- This renders a web page with reduced number of requests from the browser as files are grouped and whitespaces are trimmed.
- Precompiled files can also be attached.
References
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