In my current role I am responsible for 2 development teams; Internet/Intranet, and Data/BI. Whilst the latter is mainly internal staff, the intranet is mostly Windows hosted and .Net, and the Intranet is SharePoint, and for these I employ the assistance of contractors. It is through the use of contractors from SSW and the successful delivery of so many projects using Scrum, I decided 3 months ago to apply scrum to data development also.
Agile and data development.
I already had in place my dev, test and prod environments, but my build and code (DML) management was not up to scratch. Following an engagement with Agile BI in Sydney, we got our databases into TFS, and now can build and deploy databases from TFS.
Having all solutions in place is just the beginning, persuading the stakeholders that all work was going to be split into PBIs and that they were no longer going to have only major version releases has been difficult, and I'm not all together convinced they are on board. However, the product backlog is attractive to them, as it the 2 week schedule for release. The biggest challenge is that having not run agile in such a mature environment there is a district lack of unit tests, and so all development is that bit slower while we retrofit, review and implement.
Having all solutions in place is just the beginning, persuading the stakeholders that all work was going to be split into PBIs and that they were no longer going to have only major version releases has been difficult, and I'm not all together convinced they are on board. However, the product backlog is attractive to them, as it the 2 week schedule for release. The biggest challenge is that having not run agile in such a mature environment there is a district lack of unit tests, and so all development is that bit slower while we retrofit, review and implement.