Agile Data Warehousing: Delivering World-Class Business Intelligence Systems Using Scrum and XP

Rarely does a consulting firm gather its expertise on a subject, especially knowledge as valuable as rapid data warehousing, and place it in a book. This volume distills more than ten years of research conducted at Ceregenics, Inc., on creating development teams that can quickly and effectively develop business intelligence applications. Given that building and deploying data warehouses can cost millions, Agile Data Warehousing not only offers practitioners financial savings but also shortens delivery times and improves application quality. The Agile movement has yielded exciting innovations for "maximizing the work not done" in software engineering. Generally, however, the movement offers only high-level approaches geared more for data capture systems than for data management applications.With Agile Data Warehousing, Ceregenics adapts generic Scrum and XP for data warehousing, grooms them into a single, bona fide development method, and demonstrates that the results can pass formal methodological evaluations such as those found in SEI's Capability Maturity Model.Featured is a six-stage plan for launching Agile warehouse projects that guides data applications professionals step-by-step in becoming a world-class development team. It also describes how to avoid resistance and repair turmoil that introducing a radical method can cause, even for a Fortune 500 company with a skeptical information systems department grounded in traditional project management techniques.