How To Bring Agile Practices To Your Data Projects
Data Engineering Podcast
00:00
Refactoring of the Data Model
We have to understand what our architecture looks like, what our layers are and the ones we think we're going to add later. The technical depth of changing them is massive so that we understand the consequence of that change. Our entire product is based on Google Cloud, right, it's one of the bets we made really early. We want to keep it as low cost, as low complexity as possible. It's actually one of the best bets we've ever made.
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Summary
Agile methodologies have been adopted by a majority of teams for building software applications. Applying those same practices to data can prove challenging due to the number of systems that need to be included to implement a complete feature. In this episode Shane Gibson shares practical advice and insights from his years of experience as a consultant and engineer working in data about how to adopt agile principles in your data work so that you can move faster and provide more value to the business, while building systems that are maintainable and adaptable.
Announcements
- Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
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- Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Shane Gibson about how to bring Agile practices to your data management workflows
Interview
- Introduction
- How did you get involved in the area of data management?
- Can you describe what AgileData is and the story behind it?
- What are the main industries and/or use cases that you are focused on supporting?
- The data ecosystem has been trying on different paradigms from software development for some time now (e.g. DataOps, version control, etc.). What are the aspects of Agile that do and don’t map well to data engineering/analysis?
- One of the perennial challenges of data analysis is how to approach data modeling. How do you balance the need to provide value with the long-term impacts of incomplete or underinformed modeling decisions made in haste at the beginning of a project?
- How do you design in affordances for refactoring of the data models without breaking downstream assets?
- Another aspect of implementing data products/platforms is how to manage permissions and governance. What are the incremental ways that those principles can be incorporated early and evolved along with the overall analytical products?
- What are some of the organizational design strategies that you find most helpful when establishing or training a team who is working on data products?
- In order to have a useful target to work toward it’s necessary to understand what the data consumers are hoping to achieve. What are some of the challenges of doing requirements gathering for data products? (e.g. not knowing what information is available, consumers not understanding what’s hard vs. easy, etc.)
- How do you work with the "customers" to help them understand what a reasonable scope is and translate that to the actual project stages for the engineers?
- What are some of the perennial questions or points of confusion that you have had to address with your clients on how to design and implement analytical assets?
- What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen agile principles used for data?
- What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on AgileData?
- When is agile the wrong choice for a data project?
- What do you have planned for the future of AgileData?
Contact Info
- @shagility on Twitter
Parting Question
- From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?
Closing Announcements
- Thank you for listening! Don’t forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.__init__ covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning.
- Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes.
- If you’ve learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email hosts@dataengineeringpodcast.com) with your story.
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Links
- AgileData
- OptimalBI
- How To Make Toast
- Data Mesh
- Information Product Canvas
- DataKitchen
- Great Expectations
- Soda Data
- Google DataStore
- Unfix.work
- Activity Schema
- Data Vault
- Star Schema
- Lean Methodology
- Scrum
- Kanban
The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
Sponsored By:
- Atlan:  Have you ever woken up to a crisis because a number on a dashboard is broken and no one knows why? Or sent out frustrating slack messages trying to find the right data set? Or tried to understand what a column name means? Our friends at Atlan started out as a data team themselves and faced all this collaboration chaos themselves, and started building Atlan as an internal tool for themselves. Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to [dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan](https://www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan) and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription.
- Prefect:  Prefect is the modern Dataflow Automation platform for the modern data stack, empowering data practitioners to build, run and monitor robust pipelines at scale. Guided by the principle that the orchestrator shouldn’t get in your way, Prefect is the only tool of its kind to offer the flexibility to write code as workflows. Prefect specializes in glueing together the disparate pieces of a pipeline, and integrating with modern distributed compute libraries to bring power where you need it, when you need it. Trusted by thousands of organizations and supported by over 20,000 community members, Prefect powers over 100MM business critical tasks a month. For more information on Prefect, visit…
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