Canada 
Scott will be presenting the following session
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Scott Ambler - Agile Data Warehousing (DW)/Business Intelligence (BI): Addressing the Hard Problems
45 Mins
Talk
Intermediate
The world moves at a rapid pace, and your organization must be able to respond to changing conditions. Your DW/BI team is being asked to help end users answer new questions to gain new insights at an increasing pace. They need to become agile, but are struggling to do so.
In this session Scott Ambler addresses a series of difficult questions that DW/BI must have answers to if they are to learn how to work in a work in an agile manner:
- How can we proceed without modeling everything up front?
- What can we do when our users can’t tell us what data they need?
- How can we easily respond to changing requirements?
- How do we implement “vertical slices” of value?
- It takes weeks to analyze a legacy data source, how does that fit into a two-week sprint?
- How can we realistically deal with the quality problems of all the data sources that we work with, and usually aren’t responsible for?
- Our end users want updates in hours or days, how do we do that in two-week sprints?
- Is it realistic to evolve production data sources?
- How can we deliver new changes quickly into production?
- And more.
Organizations around the world have successfully adopted agile and lean ways of working (WoW) on the DW/BI teams. You can too.
1. What got you started/interested in modern software development methods?
We had a computer programming class in high school. I started coding in grade 10 and never looked back.
2. What do you think is the biggest challenge faced by the software product engineering community today?
Lack of maturity. We really need some sort of recognized software engineering education and apprenticeship strategy.
3. What do you think are the most exciting developments in software product engineering today?
The citizen development movement, where business users are developing their own applications using low code/no-code development tools holds great promise.
4. Why did you choose the topic(s) you will be speaking about at the conference?
I have been working in the data space for decades. Just like a fleet moves at the pace of its slowest ship, an IT department moves at the pace of its slowest team. That team is very often the data group, but it doesn't have to be that way.
5. What are some of the key takeaways from your session(s) at Agile India?
- It is possible, and highly desirable, for DW/BI teams to work in an agile manner
- DW/BI is different from app development, but not so much that you can't be agile
- All of the challenges faced by DW/BI teams can be overcome, there is no reason why they can't be agile
6. Which sessions are you particularly looking forward to attending at Agile India this year?
All of them.
7. Any personal remarks/message you want to share with the software community?
Learn something new every day.
