This article covers the Basics of Agile Development using Ruby on Rails. In recent years, a new style of software development project management framework has taken the lead for most development teams. Due in part to the surging popularity of using Rails to quickly iterate on projects this framework for software development has been dubbed the ‘agile-rails framework’, commonly referred to as ‘Agile’ for short. The result of hundreds of thousands of dev hours and countless software projects, the Agile framework is a wildly popular method for managing the development of software projects.
Perhaps the most commonly used programming language in Agile development is Ruby. The primary focus of this method is to develop full-scale web applications mirroring the Model-View-Controller architecture. The reason ROR( Ruby on Rails) is so popularly associated with Agile is that it needs just a few lines of code to build a whole web application and generally requires less configuration than you usually need when you use other applications.
A Quick Primer on The Programming Language Ruby
Ruby is an object-oriented programming language It was first created and designed by Yukihiro in Japan sometime around the 1990s. The syntax that you use in Ruby is like that of Perl. The semantics used in it is like that of Smalltalk. Ruby uses the C dialect. David Heinemeier, the creator of Rails, wrote its framework using Ruby in 2003 with the initial release around the year 2005.
From the past few years, Ruby on Rails development has become incredibly popular with startups looking to iterate on the first version of their product quickly. The ROR framework has grown to encompass an extensive list of features. The features include asynchronous emails, foreign keys, a web console as well as active job and adequate records management.
Lastly, there are so many benefits you get to enjoy when you use Ruby on Rails development. Here are some of the fundamental principles of Rail and why you should begin using it.
No Repetition At All
To make the code more maintainable and efficient, Ruby on Rails uses the principle called DRY. DRY means Don’t repeat yourself. The main reason why it is great is that you can avoid duplication and reduce the number of errors when writing code. DRY helps engineers make a representation of objects more reliable and unequivocal. This is one of the main reason why Rails was created.
Since the team members are highly qualified and experienced, each of them has the expertise in certain activities such as designing, coding, testing, and quality acceptance. At the end of each sprint, the product-owner verifies the product feature that the team develops. Once the PO is okay with the product, they then present it to the stakeholders for their review. Stakeholders comments are well noted and worked upon to improve the product in the current product development cycle. The entire process is repeated several times in the form of sprints until the development of all the constituent product features is complete.
Convention Not Configuration
Rails has its own set of conventions that can speed up the development process. Rails applications in their most basic form save programmers a considerable amount of development time. In contrast, Java requires engineers to configure just about everything, where with Rails there are a number of predefined conventions that drive development standards.
REST stands for the Representational State Transfer. It is one unique architectural software style that is the backbone of numerous modern applications. The primary emphasis of REST is to better the relationship between the client and the server. It is also useful in making the structural components of an app a lot more logical and compatible with one another. ROR makes heavy use of the REST framework.
The Agile Software Development Method
Agile takes a collaborative approach between teams that are cross-functional. It helps in promoting adaptive planning as well as development. It also allows engineers to deliver outputs much faster and helps engineers and managers to find areas for improvement. Agile’s ultimate goal is to help accelerate areas for improvement and help you identify things that you can improve. Agile can help accelerate and increase the flexibility of a team to respond to errors and mitigate the hurdles that occur in the product development life cycle.
Uses MVC Architecture
Firstly, one main feature of Ruby on Rails is that it is heavily dependant on the MVC architecture. MVC stands for Model-View-Controller. The advantage of using this particular model is that you can detach business logic from the client user interface, allowing individual components to maintain and update more easily. It also provides a ‘defacto’ structure for creating web pages, database as well as web services. MVC does allow engineers to use existing web standards such as HTML, XML, and Javascript.
Agile Development Life Cycle
Secondly, Agile development life cycle based primarily on the iterative and incremental process models. The primary focus is adaptability to product change requirements and to improve customer satisfaction. You can achieve this only through the rapid delivery of working product features and participation from the client. The agile methods focus mainly on breaking the product into smaller and easily deployable “shippable” product features.
These are developed using the incremental cycles which we call “sprints.” Traditionally speaking, each agile sprint usually lasts anywhere between two weeks to a month. But the agile trends now indicate that the sprint can be anywhere between seven to ten working days. Cross-functional teams work concurrently in developing the product features in the daily sprints.
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