Scaling Agile Data Warehousing

Two years ago, I found myself with five Agile feature teams developing in parallel on an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) with a single integrated code base. While the introduction of Agile was showing promise, we would need to find a way to make Agile data warehousing work better at scale if we were going to be successful. There is no definitive text on how to scale Agile data warehousing, and when we looked for real- world examples to learn from, we struggled to find any. It seemed that many were of the view that Agile is not compatible with large-scale integrated enterprise data warehouses.

Not deterred by the lack of peers to learn from, we pushed ahead. Rather than approaching the problem from an Agile data warehousing perspective, we looked to the world of Agile software development, applying its values and principles and adapting practices to fit our context. It was these approaches that led us to research Dean Leffingwell’s Scale Agile Framework (SAFe) and decide to leverage it in making our Agile delivery approach work at scale.

Use this link to download the full Article from the January 2014 issue of the Cutter IT Journal.