TDWI Denver Seminar

Prerequisite: None

Aaron Fuller

CBIP

Principal and Owner

Superior Data Strategies LLC

Agilists criticize the “big design up front” (BDUF) nature of plan-driven development. Uncertainty early in a project makes BDUF costly and risky. However, the avoidance of BDUF is sometimes misconstrued to mean “no design up front,” which leads to poor quality and high technical debt. What is truly needed is sufficient design up front—enough to galvanize developers around a shared understanding of the problem domain, architecture, and data models.

Likewise, you can’t really be agile if your testing is entirely reactive and manual, because testing quickly becomes a bottleneck that impedes the goal of delivering new features every few weeks. The answers can be found by adapting long-standing software development and testing practices to data efforts.

This course introduces an agile modeling approach that strikes the sufficient-up-front and just-in-time balance. It will also introduce you to agile testing principles, test-first development practices, the importance of testing as a front-end development driver rather than a back-end quality assurance activity, and effective open source database testing tools.

You Will Learn

• Agile modeling values and principles
• Techniques for determining the right level of upfront design
• How to avoid overbuilding solutions by designing for what is needed
• Domain modeling and data model patterns
• Data smells and the impact of technical debt
• Continuous integration
• Safe refactoring techniques for making incremental design changes
• How to determine the right level of design documentation
• Effective collaborative modeling practices for cross-functional teams
• How to minimize the amount of unnecessary rework through reference and conceptual designs
• Agile testing framework versus conventional testing
• Principles for developing robust test suites
• Open source testing tools such as Fitnesse/DbFit and Cucumber
• How to version control your test suites
• Behavior Driven Development (BDD) and Test-Driven Development (TDD)
• How to write good acceptance criteria for BI/DW user stories

Geared To

• Data warehouse architects, designers, developers, and administrators
• Business intelligence practitioners
• Business analysts and product owners
• Data warehousing project managers