Bussines Intelligence

Agile Way of BI Implementation
Bhawna Rehani (Author)
Business Intelligence -Technology excellence Group Tata Consultancy services
The rapidly changing IT economy has influenced the Business Intelligence (BI) systems to look at innovative ways to be equally fast and flexible. There is a need to be more intuitive and quick in implementation so as to adapt to the changing environment. One of theways by which organizations can achieve these goals is by using Agile based BI development models. There are many components in a successful BI solution which include data integration, analytics, data quality, metadata management, enterprise data warehouse, dashboards and so on. Each of these components are critical for an organization, and stakeholders are ready to invest in these. The onlyissue is how quickly we can provide these solutions and how flexible these solutions are with the changing demands. Traditionally, we have been using the waterfall SDLC model for BI implementations which encourages getting requirements clarity in the initial phases of the projects and having distinct deliverables for each phase. With time the approach has been customized and enhanced to ‘iterativewaterfall approach’ where a chunk of requirements is implemented in one SDLC cycle. Though this approach has been successful in the past, the BI practitioners recognize that business requirements are not static and we must be able to effectively mould the deliverables based on changing requirements. Hence, we cannot continue with the Waterfall (or Iterative waterfall) project management approach thatis neither fast nor flexible. Applying the concepts of agile development to BI is the intuitive way forward. The aim of this paper is to provide a background on agile project management & development techniques, and suggest some guidelines and best practices which can help in successful Agile BI implementations. Keywords- Agile , Buisness Intelligence, Scrum, Development methodlogy

• • • • •What is Agile? Why Agile for BI? How is it implemented? When to move to Agile? How is Agile performance measured?

The paper gives a background on Agile and specifically how Agile helps in BI implementation. It explains various agile methodologies applicable to BI. It also suggests the best practices that can be followed in an Agile BI implementation. II. BACKGROUND

A. Introduction to AgileSoftware Development First, confirm that you have the correct template for your pap Agile is an iterative software development methodology which encourages incremental and continual development of the product. The requirements and design of the software evolve through close collaboration between the sponsors and the development teams. In this methodology, the requirements are broken in to smalluser stories which should be independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small and testable. Iterations or Sprints are short time frames that typically last from one to four weeks. In each iteration, the team works through a full software development cycle including planning, requirements analysis, design, coding, unit testing, and acceptance testing. In acceptance testing, a working product isdemonstrated to stakeholders. This minimizes the overall risk and allows the project to adapt to changes quickly. Documentation is produced as and when required. A Sprint should add some valuable features that are bug free and ready to be deployed to Production. Production release may be done once a group of features are added to the Product and can be used by the Sponsors. Agile development usecommunication as an important tool. All the Agile meetings are face-to-face where the main goal is to collaborate and take decisions as a team. This faceto-face communication exposes any issues as they rise and

I.

INTRODUCTION

The recession and economic turmoil in the past few years have forced the developers and sponsors to reconsider the development and delivery of BI solutions. Low...