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To paraphrase the egg marketing board, agile isn't just for application developers anymore-it's for all information technology professionals. This includes developers and development management, quality assurance professionals, and yes, even data professionals.
I suggest that data professionals must at least start adopting evolutionary (iterative and incremental) techniques and, better yet, agile techniques, if they are to remain relevant within the modern IT environment. This change will take several years and will prove to be difficult for some, but will result in greater overall levels of productivity.
Let's examine two trends. First, every modern software development process-Extreme Programming (XP), Feature Driven Development (FDD), Scrum, Dynamic System Development Method (DSDM), Crystal, Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD), the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and the Enterprise Unified Process (EUP)-takes an evolutionary approach to development. Data professionals may not like this, and they may choose to fight against this trend, but the fact is that the IT sector is clearly moving in this direction.
The second trend has to do with agile software development. Agile techniques, such as XP, FDD, DSDM, Scrum and AMDD, are growing in popularity. The reason for this is simple-they work very well in practice. A simple definition of agile software development is that it is evolutionary development performed in a highly collaborative manner, delivering high-quality, working software that meets the highest priority needs of your project stakeholders.
Many traditionalists like to denigrate agilists, yet the fact remains that true agile teams are building systems with incredibly high-quality code, concise documentation, and a nearly 100 percent regression test suite (user interface testing can be tough), and are doing so very cost effectively. Can you honestly make this claim yourself? If not, I highly suggest taking agile seriously.
AGILITY 101
The agile manifesto (www .agilemanifesto.org) is defined by four simple value statements-the important thing to understand is that while you should value the concepts on the right-hand side, you should value the things on the left-hand side even more. A good way to think about the manifesto is that it defines preferences, not alternatives, encouraging a focus on certain areas but not eliminating others. The values are as follows:
* Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
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