TDWI World Conference

Prerequisite: This half-day course builds upon to the previous day's An Agile Method for Data Warehousing.

Ralph Hughes

Agile data warehousing can indeed sound improbable. How can developers blaze ahead, focusing on only a few requirements at a time, and not overlook something important? This half-day course presents a technique for tempering agile’s inherent rush to deliver with the essential components of requirements management (RM) found in very large software projects. We will borrow the more traditional RM approach of the RUP methodology and blend it with the extremely lightweight style of agile’s scrum, finding a natural intersection between the two.

We will discuss how to streamline RUP-style artifacts for a scrum project and then develop a strategy for starting BI/DW efforts wherever the sponsor demands, backfilling the artifacts as we go to bring the full breadth and depth of projects into sufficient focus. We will also consider some of the features of a commercial tool for amplifying your customers’ data governance efforts into working prototypes, yielding more precise requirements.

The presenter has developed and tested these notions in the full spectrum of BI/DW teams for the Fortune 500—from CMMI-compliant, multi-year projects involving more than 150 people, to fast and effective scrum teams of 10 participants or fewer.

You Will Learn

• How to start projects quickly and accurately with a requirements framework
• How to skip the paralysis caused by vague or impossibly large user stories
• How to avoid agile’s nemesis of endless scope creep
• How to predict how much the project will cost and when it will be online
• How to define work enough so that everyone knows what to do now and what is coming next
• How to position your team to provide quality architecture and data modeling
• How to incorporate definitive user acceptance testing to prove projects are complete and successful

Geared To

• Developers; team leads; project managers; also of interest to product owners and shared resources such as analysts, DBAs, testers, and technical managers