Agile development methodologies such as Scrum have become increasingly popular in enterprise IT organizations. Compared to traditional “waterfall” development processes, Agile development promises to make IT projects more responsive to changing business requirements. In place of multi-month, multi-phase development processes, IT organizations adopt a process of continuous innovation and improvement. 30-day sprints replace annual or bi-annual releases. Lines of business get code within weeks or a few months of asking for it. New features become a possibility for “this quarter” instead of “next year,” and developers gain real-world insights into their work more quickly than ever before.
Agile Development for Data Warehouses
In many organizations, agile development seems to be catching on everywhere except in ETL and data warehouse development. Why?
The answer lies in the way that most data warehouses are still developed. Business analysts and software architects define rules, mappings, and queries. Developers than build the specified solution by hand. When business requirements change, the process often begins over again, or at best developers comb through code making adjustments. The process in either case is time-consuming and error-prone—hardly agile and efficient.
How can IT organizations break out of this multi-phase cycle and become more lean and agile?
By adopting a development platform like Gamma Data Warehouse Studio (DWS) that automates production of over 95% of the code required for data warehouses. Using DWS, business analysts, software architects, and lead developers can enter changes to business requirements and design specifications through the DWS UI, and then automatically generate all or nearly all of the code requirement for the project. Development time shrinks from months or weeks to minutes.
IT becomes more responsive to lines of business, and the organization overall becomes more agile.
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