Agile by Design

Chapter 9Gathering Analytic User Stories

As you now know, agile analytics projects don't attempt to predict or plan every possible requirement in advance, but they do have a structure that keeps the team's eye on the goal. Team members make decisions with the information they have at the time and then reviews and revalidates that information (and takes in new information!) throughout the project. When using an agile framework, the team doesn't invest a lot of time or effort in gathering all of the details up front. In an agile analytic project, that's not possible most of the time anyway—the insights you find along the way help define the next steps (see Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1 Analytic User Story Considerations

Overview

If we were going to use a waterfall project management methodology, we'd gather requirements in a series of lengthy requirements sessions at the start of our project, take a lot of notes, and write up a bunch of requirement documents that no one would ever look at. What's worse is that those documents would likely become irrelevant very quickly: Throughout the project duration, business needs almost always change or need refinement. Change in a waterfall project is generally discouraged; after all, if someone changes his or her mind after the team has completed a lot of work, that can result in rework. In this case, change would be managed through a complex ...