It has been quite a while since my last blog post. The major reason for this is that my company IT-Logix decided to start its own blog. So I wrote a few articles, all of them in German. Therefore if you are interested in this post in German, you’ll find it here.
At IT-Logix we’re tackling the Agile topic for more than three years now. The main question is how you can apply the agile principles in a BI/DWH environment. You cannot “create” agility directly. It is much more a side effect of a combination of methods, concepts and technologies which are all agility oriented. The starting point is often – this is true for me too – the Agile Manifesto. The values and principles written down in the Agile Manifesto describe the “mindset” which is the most important component on your journey to more agility. Because no method, no concept and no tool solve any problem if the involved people don’t get the “sense” behind it.
If someone hears “agile” they typically think about Scrum. Scrum is a project method which has been around in the software development space for quite a time and now emerges more and more in otherĀ domains – including BI and DWH projects. The circumstance that many people associate Agile and Scrum directly show that the inventors of Scrum were established a pretty good marketing around it. Still, you should consider three things here:
- What is called Scrum in certain organisations often is far away from the basic idea of Scrum, namely the agile mindest. Michael James described this recently on Twitter as follows:
This often leads to frustration – an amusing blog post puts it in a nutshell: http://antiagilemanifesto.com/ - Alongside the strong marketing of Scrum we find a proprietary terminology. An iteration is called a sprint, a daily coordination meeting “daily scrum”, a ToDo list becomes a backlog etc. This brings the danger of understanding and hence communication problems between stakeholders inside and outside the project organisation, especially senior management.
- Scrum is only one out of multiple agile practices – and for itself alone not always the most suitable method regarding its application in the BI/DWH environment.
Looking at my customer I experience again and again aspects which contradict an iterative project approach. Even just the project setup requires a project request with estimated efforts, a project plan and milestones. From an architectural perspective one needs to consider an already existing overall architecture, typically data models and systems which are already in place. During implementation often multiple teams of the organisation are involved, there are a lot of dependencies and therefore (unexpected) waiting times. How can you incorporate these surrounding conditions into a specific project method and still embrace the values of the Agile Manifesto?
In autumn 2014 I got to know the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) framework of Scott Ambler. In my eyes Scott and his co-authors very well manage to bridge the gap between Scrum as a pure development method and the needs of an enterprise environment. Thereby DAD doesn’t reinvent things but provides a structure to put different methods in a bigger, overarching context.
DAD provides different project lifecycles. The basic “Agile” lifecycle contains many elements out of Scrum but resigns to use a proprietary language. An important aspect in addition is the inception phase where the necessary coordination with the “big picture” can happen.
Iterations a primarily based on a time box approach. That means you fix the time frame and vary the scope of an iteration in a way that it fits into this time slot. Depending on your environement this can become pretty tricky. Especially if other teams from which you depend do not follow this (time boxed) approach. That’s the reason why DAD provide further lifecycles, e.g. the lean lifecycle:
The basic structure remains the same, but the time boxed iterations are missing. Thereby the flexibility increases, but equally the danger of getting bogged down. At this place we need a certain discipline – the name “Disciplined” Agile Delivery has its roots in this reality.
To better get to know DAD we invited Scott Ambler for a two days workshop at IT-Logix by end of January 2015. As with Scrum, you can take a first certification level after such a workshop. Therefore I can proudly call me a Disciplined Agilist Yellow Belt š
To sum it up: Once more one will need a good portion of “common sense” and not method devoutness. What works in practice counts. The DAD framework gives me and our customers a meaningful guard railing to realise the added values of an agile mindset. At the same time DAD is open enough to care for the individual cutomer situations. My own contribution is to fill the described, generic processes with BI specific aspects and apply it in practice.
Event recommendation 1: As a member of the Zurich Scrum Breakfast Club I meet with other agile practitioners and interested people. The event is organized in the OpenSpace format, more infos about it here. Interested in joining us? Let me know! I can bring along a guest for free.
Event recommendation 2: Join me during the sapInsider conference BI2015 at Nice by mid of June: I’ll explain how I applied the DAD framework to a SAP BusinessObjects migration project. More information about my session here.
To end this blog post a few impressions of our DAD workshop with Scott Ambler:
Raphael Branger | Business Intelligence Artist 