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Data Mesh Principles and Logical Architecture

 Data Mesh Principles and Logical Architecture The great divide of data What do we really mean by data? The answer depends on whom you ask. Today’s landscape is divided into  operational data  and  analytical data . Operational data sits in databases behind business capabilities served with microservices, has a transactional nature, keeps the current state and serves the needs of the applications running the business. Analytical data is a temporal and aggregated view of the facts of the business over time, often modeled to provide retrospective or future-perspective insights; it trains the ML models or feeds the analytical reports. The current state of technology, architecture and organization design is reflective of the divergence of these two data planes - two levels of existence, integrated yet separate. This divergence has led to a fragile architecture. Continuously failing ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) jobs and ever growing complexity of labyrinth of data pipel...

Large Agile Projects

 Large Agile Projects

A common question is whether large projects can be done with agile techniques. After all many agile approaches are designed for smaller projects and the heavyweight ideas that they resist are more needed on bigger projects.

One of the main reasons that this is a question is because we don't know yet. New techniques tend to be tried on smaller projects first. Only when they work on a smaller scale do people try them on a larger scale, and even then it takes time to ramp up. With any technique or technology I wouldn't recommend using it on anything larger than twice the size of something you've used it successfully already.

Despite this much of what goes with agility has a background in larger systems, depending on what you call large. For software projects I think the primary measure of large is number of people. The people there are, the more the communication issues rise. XP's sweet spot is up to twenty team members. FDD looks to be more, more in the mid tens. Talking to Phillipe Kruchten, the lead designer of RUP, RUP at its essence is very much an agile approach and Phillipe has primarily worked with projects of over 200 people.

Scaling Agile methods is the last thing you should do

I used this phrase recently at the Canadian Agile Network. I meant it literally. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do large projects, I'm saying that trying to scale agile techniques up to big projects, while often necessary, shouldn't be your first choice.

A better approach is to try to scale down your project. At that workshop an unscientific straw poll revealed that most projects could lose about half the people of the project without making things go slower. Time and time again I hear of success occurring when a team is cut significantly in size. Large teams carry a big overhead in communication and management. Using smaller teams staffed with more able people is usually faster and cheaper, even if the everyone is more individually expensive.

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Data Mesh Principles and Logical Architecture

 Data Mesh Principles and Logical Architecture The great divide of data What do we really mean by data? The answer depends on whom you ask. Today’s landscape is divided into  operational data  and  analytical data . Operational data sits in databases behind business capabilities served with microservices, has a transactional nature, keeps the current state and serves the needs of the applications running the business. Analytical data is a temporal and aggregated view of the facts of the business over time, often modeled to provide retrospective or future-perspective insights; it trains the ML models or feeds the analytical reports. The current state of technology, architecture and organization design is reflective of the divergence of these two data planes - two levels of existence, integrated yet separate. This divergence has led to a fragile architecture. Continuously failing ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) jobs and ever growing complexity of labyrinth of data pipel...

Pair Programming Misconceptions

Pair Programming Misconceptions A bunch of common misconceptions about Pair Programming. You have to do pair programming if you're doing an agile process. This is utterly false. 'Agile' is a very broad term defined only in terms of values and principles, most notably in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The manifesto doesn't mention pair programming and most agile methods don't make it part of their approach. Since pair programming is a practice of XP it's had a lot of influence in the agile community. As a result it's often mentioned as an agile practice - meaning a practice that's commonly used by people on agile projects. But that's an observation not a prescription. Extreme Programming forces you to do Pair-Programming This is much more nuanced issue. Pair-Programming is one of the practices of XP and has been since its inception. The nuance here is whether XP practices are mandatory for a team that claims to be doing XP. This is actu...

ActivityOriented

  ActivityOriented Any significant software development effort requires several different activities to occur: analysis, user experience design, development, testing, etc. Activity-oriented teams organize around these activities, so that you have dedicated teams for user-experience design, development, testing etc. Activity-orientation promises many benefits, but software development is usually better done with   OutcomeOriented   teams. Traditionally, big businesses with large IT departments (Enterprise IT) have tended to execute IT development projects with a bunch of activity-oriented teams drawn from a matrix IT organization (functional organization). The solid-lined arms of the matrix (headed by a VP of development, testing and so on) are usually along activity boundaries and they loan out “resources” to dotted-lined project or program organizations. Common justifications for doing so include: It helps standardization of conventions and techniques in development if a...