Networking and Nibbles from 5.30pm. Presentation 6pm to 7pm.

Meet at Reception of the IBM Building.

Save your career: Data modelling in an "agile" world

Agile Development vs Data Model Perfection: A Blended Approach to Achieving Flexible Models that Deliver Value Sooner

One could be forgiven for concluding that there’s a civil war (or not-so-civil war) between data architects and “agile” developers. The architects want quality; they’ve had to live with the technical debt left behind by developers with short-term goals. The agile developers (and the business) won’t wait for the perfect data model before coding starts. In fact, the agile developers claim that they’ll discover a better model over a few iterations than the data architects would have ever discovered while sitting in some ivory tower.

Data architects and data modellers who are feeling confused and left behind by (and increasingly unemployable in) the fast-paced agile world can take heart. Rather than defending our position and hoping that “they” (the agile developers) will understand “us”, we can adapt, roll up our sleeves, and join them in their fun and frantic sphere, doing it without compromising our values, and achieving all of this through a simple but effective “pattern of patterns” approach that leverages published data model patterns.

If you feel under pressure to deliver, be it for business-as-usual demands, or for the new, emerging, and distinctive demands of agile projects, this session may provide a framework for not only surviving, but flourishing. It aims to achieve this via a pattern-based approach that offers delivery of data model quality at the speeds demanded in this increasingly nimble world.

Speaker: John Giles

John Giles is an independent consultant, focusing on information architecture, but with a passion for seeing ideas taken to fruition. He has worked in the industry since the late 1960s, across many industries. He is a Fellow in the Australian Computer Society, and completed a Master’s degree at RMIT University, with a minor thesis comparing computational rules implementations using traditional and object-oriented platforms. He has recently published “The Nimble Elephant: Agile Delivery of Data Models Using a Pattern-based Approach”.