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April 11, 2008
BI and Agile Principals
From the Agile Manifesto
We follow these principles:Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.Welcome changing requirements, even late in
development. Agile processes harness change for
the customer's competitive advantage.Deliver working software frequently, from a
couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a
preference to the shorter timescale.Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.The most efficient and effective method of
conveying information to and within a development
team is face-to-face conversation.Working software is the primary measure of progress.
Agile processes promote sustainable development.
The sponsors, developers, and users should be able
to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.Continuous attention to technical excellence
and good design enhances agility.Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount
of work not done--is essential.The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams.At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly.
These principles would be useful for any project, especially BI. Many may read these and think, "of course, everyone does that, it's common sense" but we all know that common sense is not common practice. While these are just words, I find that it is powerful to have a set of declared and shared tenets for any project that is created by the team responsible. Agile provides a great starting and lots of food for thought.
Remember, if BI was easy, everyone would be making better decisions, but clearly that is not the case. I believe Agile best practices can help streamline BI efforts and help deliver better applications that are easier to use.
Your thoughts?
Eleanor Taylor is Marketing Director at Pathfinder Development. She can be reached at etaylor@pathf.com or visit www.pathf.com
Posted by Eleanor Taylor at April 11, 2008 3:45 PM
Comments
Looks good - I would probably add some more clarification on what the sponsor interaction should be (constant, focused, relevant and sufficient for all decisions), and at the same time - I would add a bit about how do we prioritize between the different features within a project (who prioritizes, and according to what value estimate within the project?)
But that might be a bit too operational instead of principal.
Best regards
Posted by: Peter Møllebjerg Andersen at April 14, 2008 3:47 AM
Hi Peter,
Thank you for your comment.
I think sponsor interaction is critical. You must manage the sponsor's time wisely. I don't think every daily SCRUM (stand-up meetings designed to be 10 minutes or less to address progress and obstacles) needs the sponsor's attention unless the sponsor is needed to remove obstacles. However, I believe it would become obvious when sponsor intervention is necessary.
I do believe a sponsor should be involved in every sprint planning meeting. Each sprint produces working software, and are typically about 2 weeks in length. In the sprint planning meeting the working software is demonstrated, feedback is gathered in terms of improvements and enhancements, and the next set of deliverables is decided upon as a team. The sprint planning meeting is where trade offs between time, effort and value become apparent. The team rates the level of complexity/time required to develop each feature and then decides what the focus should be and produces a task list for the sprint that is reviewed during daily scrums. Items that did not make it into the sprint are added to the backlog for consideration for the next sprint. And so on.
For me, this was a very different process than I was used to but I have found seeing running software sooner and having to make choices about what is in and what is out for each sprint has been very effective and makes prioritizing much easier.
Probably more information than you wanted but I appreciate the comment and wanted to respond to your questions.
Posted by: Eleanor Taylor at April 17, 2008 10:58 PM
