Chapter 26. The Payroll Case Study: Iteration 1 | Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#

Everything which is in any way beautiful is beautiful in itself, and terminates in itself, not having praise as part of itself.

Marcus Aurelius, circa A.D. 170

The following case study describes the first iteration in the development of a simple batch payroll system. You will find the user stories in this case study to be simplistic. For example, taxes are simply not mentioned. This is typical of an early iteration. It will provide only a very small part of the business value the customers need.

In this chapter, we do the kind of quick analysis and design session that often takes place at the start of a normal iteration. The customer has selected the stories for the iteration, and now we have to figure out how we are going to implement them. Such design sessions are short and cursory, just like this chapter. The UML diagrams you see here are no more than hasty sketches on a whiteboard. The real design work will take place in the next chapter, when we work through the unit tests and implementations.