Webcast: Agile Business Intelligence – Proven Techniques that move BI Development into the Agile World
As more and more organizations embrace agile development methodologies, tools and agile processes are becoming more mainstream and almost transparent to the developer; however, the problem of embracing agile development is still an issue for those working on Business Intelligence projects. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that tools for BI development haven’t quite caught up to the unique problems presented by Business Intelligence development. This session will discuss Agile techniques as they relate to Business Intelligence Projects, with a particular focus on Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) development. Attendees will learn how to adapt the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) for Agile process template for Business Intelligence, and will show how to integrate Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server into your agile BI projects. Attendees will leave this session with a good understanding of how agile can apply to the BI world.
Presented by: Ted Malone
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> Live date: 10/27/2010 at 12:00 Pacific
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Agile and BI
The upcoming Webcast remindes me of one of my favorite disciplines. That is the Agile software development techniques. And better yet, applying Agile techniques to the BI Stack.
Without trying to take the wind out of the sails for the WebCast, I’d like to take a little time here to talk about some ways Agile can be applied to BI development.
One of the practices of Agile software development is to break down the requirements (decompose) into small steps that can be accomplished in a short period of time. An example requirement (called a story in Agile terminology) may be as small as, "I need to import todays rate exchange amounts into a currency dimension in my data warehouse from an authoritative source so that I can convert performance from one currency to another currency."
I don’t know everything about how I am going to do it yet. However, I do know where the data will come from, and I know that whatever is in the foreign source must have the same data in my warehouse after it is imported.
So in an agile world I can start working on this small piece. I can write a test routine confirming that the data imported into my new currency exchange dimension is the same as the source data I drew from. With that in hand, I can now start writing the import software. Once my test passes, I’m done.
How did I know I needed to import daily exchange rates. Because other stories were available that demonstrated a need to convert currency. Perhaps there was a story saying we need a report that demonstrates our company profit translated to the local currency of our foreign subsidiaries in France, England, Mexico, and Canada. jWell, we can’t write the report until we have the data. So we picked the import story to work on now, and once complete we can start writing the report.
Well, there’s a little agile for today. Perhaps that will draw your interest for Agile methods. They are not that different than good traditional waterfall methods…the order of execution is what changes the most. Interested? Want to hear more, or share your experience or insight. Drop me a note at btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben