Agile Database Techniques


Book Description

Describes Agile Modeling Driven Design (AMDD) and Test-Driven Design (TDD) approaches, database refactoring, database encapsulation strategies, and tools that support evolutionary techniques Agile software developers often use object and relational database (RDB) technology together and as a result must overcome the impedance mismatch The author covers techniques for mapping objects to RDBs and for implementing concurrency control, referential integrity, shared business logic, security access control, reports, and XML An agile foundation describes fundamental skills that all agile software developers require, particularly Agile DBAs Includes object modeling, UML data modeling, data normalization, class normalization, and how to deal with legacy databases Scott W. Ambler is author of Agile Modeling (0471202827), a contributing editor with Software Development (www.sdmagazine.com), and a featured speaker at software conferences worldwide




Disciplined Agile Delivery


Book Description

Master IBM’s Breakthrough DAD Process Framework for Succeeding with Agile in Large, Complex, Mission-Critical IT Projects It is widely recognized that moving from traditional to agile approaches to build software solutions is a critical source of competitive advantage. Mainstream agile approaches that are indeed suitable for small projects require significant tailoring for larger, complex enterprise projects. In Disciplined Agile Delivery, Scott W. Ambler and Mark Lines introduce IBM’s breakthrough Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework, which describes how to do this tailoring. DAD applies a more disciplined approach to agile development by acknowledging and dealing with the realities and complexities of a portfolio of interdependent program initiatives. Ambler and Lines show how to extend Scrum with supplementary agile and lean strategies from Agile Modeling (AM), Extreme Programming (XP), Kanban, Unified Process (UP), and other proven methods to provide a hybrid approach that is adaptable to your organization’s unique needs. They candidly describe what practices work best, why they work, what the trade-offs are, and when to consider alternatives, all within the context of your situation. Disciplined Agile Delivery addresses agile practices across the entire lifecycle, from requirements, architecture, and development to delivery and governance. The authors show how these best-practice techniques fit together in an end-to-end process for successfully delivering large, complex systems--from project initiation through delivery. Coverage includes Scaling agile for mission-critical enterprise endeavors Avoiding mistakes that drive poorly run agile projects to chaos Effectively initiating an agile project Transitioning as an individual to agile Incrementally building consumable solutions Deploying agile solutions into complex production environments Leveraging DevOps, architecture, and other enterprise disciplines Adapting your governance strategy for agile projects Based on facts, research, and extensive experience, this book will be an indispensable resource for every enterprise software leader and practitioner--whether they’re seeking to optimize their existing agile/Scrum process or improve the agility of an iterative process.




Agile Data Warehouse Design


Book Description

Agile Data Warehouse Design is a step-by-step guide for capturing data warehousing/business intelligence (DW/BI) requirements and turning them into high performance dimensional models in the most direct way: by modelstorming (data modeling + brainstorming) with BI stakeholders. This book describes BEAM✲, an agile approach to dimensional modeling, for improving communication between data warehouse designers, BI stakeholders and the whole DW/BI development team. BEAM✲ provides tools and techniques that will encourage DW/BI designers and developers to move away from their keyboards and entity relationship based tools and model interactively with their colleagues. The result is everyone thinks dimensionally from the outset! Developers understand how to efficiently implement dimensional modeling solutions. Business stakeholders feel ownership of the data warehouse they have created, and can already imagine how they will use it to answer their business questions. Within this book, you will learn: ✲ Agile dimensional modeling using Business Event Analysis & Modeling (BEAM✲) ✲ Modelstorming: data modeling that is quicker, more inclusive, more productive, and frankly more fun! ✲ Telling dimensional data stories using the 7Ws (who, what, when, where, how many, why and how) ✲ Modeling by example not abstraction; using data story themes, not crow's feet, to describe detail ✲ Storyboarding the data warehouse to discover conformed dimensions and plan iterative development ✲ Visual modeling: sketching timelines, charts and grids to model complex process measurement - simply ✲ Agile design documentation: enhancing star schemas with BEAM✲ dimensional shorthand notation ✲ Solving difficult DW/BI performance and usability problems with proven dimensional design patterns Lawrence Corr is a data warehouse designer and educator. As Principal of DecisionOne Consulting, he helps clients to review and simplify their data warehouse designs, and advises vendors on visual data modeling techniques. He regularly teaches agile dimensional modeling courses worldwide and has taught dimensional DW/BI skills to thousands of students. Jim Stagnitto is a data warehouse and master data management architect specializing in the healthcare, financial services, and information service industries. He is the founder of the data warehousing and data mining consulting firm Llumino.




Practical DataOps


Book Description

Gain a practical introduction to DataOps, a new discipline for delivering data science at scale inspired by practices at companies such as Facebook, Uber, LinkedIn, Twitter, and eBay. Organizations need more than the latest AI algorithms, hottest tools, and best people to turn data into insight-driven action and useful analytical data products. Processes and thinking employed to manage and use data in the 20th century are a bottleneck for working effectively with the variety of data and advanced analytical use cases that organizations have today. This book provides the approach and methods to ensure continuous rapid use of data to create analytical data products and steer decision making. Practical DataOps shows you how to optimize the data supply chain from diverse raw data sources to the final data product, whether the goal is a machine learning model or other data-orientated output. The book provides an approach to eliminate wasted effort and improve collaboration between data producers, data consumers, and the rest of the organization through the adoption of lean thinking and agile software development principles. This book helps you to improve the speed and accuracy of analytical application development through data management and DevOps practices that securely expand data access, and rapidly increase the number of reproducible data products through automation, testing, and integration. The book also shows how to collect feedback and monitor performance to manage and continuously improve your processes and output. What You Will LearnDevelop a data strategy for your organization to help it reach its long-term goals Recognize and eliminate barriers to delivering data to users at scale Work on the right things for the right stakeholders through agile collaboration Create trust in data via rigorous testing and effective data management Build a culture of learning and continuous improvement through monitoring deployments and measuring outcomes Create cross-functional self-organizing teams focused on goals not reporting lines Build robust, trustworthy, data pipelines in support of AI, machine learning, and other analytical data products Who This Book Is For Data science and advanced analytics experts, CIOs, CDOs (chief data officers), chief analytics officers, business analysts, business team leaders, and IT professionals (data engineers, developers, architects, and DBAs) supporting data teams who want to dramatically increase the value their organization derives from data. The book is ideal for data professionals who want to overcome challenges of long delivery time, poor data quality, high maintenance costs, and scaling difficulties in getting data science output and machine learning into customer-facing production.




Agile Modeling


Book Description

The first book to cover Agile Modeling, a new modeling technique created specifically for XP projects eXtreme Programming (XP) has created a buzz in the software development community-much like Design Patterns did several years ago. Although XP presents a methodology for faster software development, many developers find that XP does not allow for modeling time, which is critical to ensure that a project meets its proposed requirements. They have also found that standard modeling techniques that use the Unified Modeling Language (UML) often do not work with this methodology. In this innovative book, Software Development columnist Scott Ambler presents Agile Modeling (AM)-a technique that he created for modeling XP projects using pieces of the UML and Rational's Unified Process (RUP). Ambler clearly explains AM, and shows readers how to incorporate AM, UML, and RUP into their development projects with the help of numerous case studies integrated throughout the book. AM was created by the author for modeling XP projects-an element lacking in the original XP design The XP community and its creator have embraced AM, which should give this book strong market acceptance Companion Web site at www.agilemodeling.com features updates, links to XP and AM resources, and ongoing case studies about agile modeling.




Refactoring Databases


Book Description

Refactoring has proven its value in a wide range of development projects–helping software professionals improve system designs, maintainability, extensibility, and performance. Now, for the first time, leading agile methodologist Scott Ambler and renowned consultant Pramodkumar Sadalage introduce powerful refactoring techniques specifically designed for database systems. Ambler and Sadalage demonstrate how small changes to table structures, data, stored procedures, and triggers can significantly enhance virtually any database design–without changing semantics. You’ll learn how to evolve database schemas in step with source code–and become far more effective in projects relying on iterative, agile methodologies. This comprehensive guide and reference helps you overcome the practical obstacles to refactoring real-world databases by covering every fundamental concept underlying database refactoring. Using start-to-finish examples, the authors walk you through refactoring simple standalone database applications as well as sophisticated multi-application scenarios. You’ll master every task involved in refactoring database schemas, and discover best practices for deploying refactorings in even the most complex production environments. The second half of this book systematically covers five major categories of database refactorings. You’ll learn how to use refactoring to enhance database structure, data quality, and referential integrity; and how to refactor both architectures and methods. This book provides an extensive set of examples built with Oracle and Java and easily adaptable for other languages, such as C#, C++, or VB.NET, and other databases, such as DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, and Sybase. Using this book’s techniques and examples, you can reduce waste, rework, risk, and cost–and build database systems capable of evolving smoothly, far into the future.




Database Administration


Book Description

Giving comprehensive, soup-to-nuts coverage of database administration, this guide is written from a platform-independent viewpoint, emphasizing best practices.




Choose Your WoW!


Book Description

"Hundreds of organizations around the world have already benefited from Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). Disciplined Agile (DA) is the only comprehensive tool kit available for guidance on building high-performance agile teams and optimizing your way of working (WoW). As a hybrid of all the leading agile and lean approaches, it provides hundreds of strategies to help you make better decisions within your agile teams, balancing self-organization with the realities and constraints of your unique enterprise context. The highlights of this handbook include: #1. As the official source of knowledge on DAD, it includes greatly improved and enhanced strategies with a revised set of goal diagrams based upon learnings from applying DAD in the field. #2 It is an essential handbook to help coaches and teams make better decisions in their daily work, providing a wealth of ideas for experimenting with agile and lean techniques while providing specific guidance and trade-offs for those "it depends" questions. #3 It makes a perfect study guide for Disciplined Agile certification. Why "fail fast" (as our industry likes to recommend) when you can learn quickly on your journey to high performance? With this handbook, you can make better decisions based upon proven, context-based strategies, leading to earlier success and better outcomes"--




User Story Mapping


Book Description

User story mapping is a valuable tool for software development, once you understand why and how to use it. This insightful book examines how this often misunderstood technique can help your team stay focused on users and their needs without getting lost in the enthusiasm for individual product features. Author Jeff Patton shows you how changeable story maps enable your team to hold better conversations about the project throughout the development process. Your team will learn to come away with a shared understanding of what you’re attempting to build and why. Get a high-level view of story mapping, with an exercise to learn key concepts quickly Understand how stories really work, and how they come to life in Agile and Lean projects Dive into a story’s lifecycle, starting with opportunities and moving deeper into discovery Prepare your stories, pay attention while they’re built, and learn from those you convert to working software




Introduction to Disciplined Agile Delivery


Book Description

Introduction to Disciplined Agile Delivery provides a quick overview of how agile software development works from beginning-to-end. It describes the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process decision framework and then works through a case study describing a typical agile team's experiences adopting a disciplined agile approach. The book describes how the team develops the first release of a mission-critical application while working in a legacy enterprise environment. It describes their experiences from beginning-to-end, starting with their initial team initiation efforts through construction and finally to deploying the solution into production. It also describes how the team stays together for future releases, overviewing their process improvement efforts from their Scrum-based beginnings through to a lean continuous delivery approach that fits in with their organization's evolving DevOps strategy.The DAD framework is a hybrid of existing methods such as Scrum, Kanban, Agile Modeling, SAFe, Extreme Programming, Agile Data, Unified Process and many others. DAD provides the flexibility to use various approaches and plugs the gaps not addressed by mainstream agile methods. In a nutshell, DAD is "pragmatic agile." DAD describes proven strategies to adapt and scale your agile initiatives to suit the unique realities of your enterprise without having to figure it all out by yourself.Here's an overview of what each chapter covers:* Chapter 1: Introduction. This chapter provides a quick overview of the book and a brief history of Disciplined Agile.* Chapter 2: Reality over Rhetoric. This chapter explores several common myths about DAD and more importantly disproves them.* Chapter 3: Disciplined Agile Delivery in a Nutshell. This chapter provides a brief yet comprehensive overview of the DAD framework. * Chapter 4: Introduction to the Case Study. This chapter introduces us to the team, describes the market opportunity that they hope to address, and describes the environment in which they're working.* Chapter 5: Inception. The team's initiation effort includes initial requirements modeling and planning with their stakeholders in a streamlined manner, initial architecture modeling, setting up their physical work environment, setting up the start of their tooling infrastructure, initial risk identification, and finally securing stakeholder support and funding for the rest of the first release.* Chapters 6 through 10: Construction. These chapters each describe a single Construction iteration, sharing the team's experiences during each of those two-week timeboxes. * Chapter 11: Transition. The two-week transition phase focuses on final testing and fixing, training the support/help-desk staff, finishing a few short end-user "how to" videos, and deploying the solution into production.* Chapter 12: Future Releases. This chapter overviews the team's improvement efforts over the next few releases, describing how they evolve from the agile Scrum-based lifecycle to a leaner approach and eventually to continuous delivery.* Chapter 13: Closing Thoughts. This chapter overviews the disciplined agile resources that are available to you.* Appendix: The Disciplined Agile IT Department. This short appendix overviews our ongoing work on the Disciplined Agile framework to address the full scope of an IT department. At 102 pages, you should find this book to be a quick, informative read.