Sprint planning optimization in agile data warehouse design

Abstract

Agile methods have been increasingly adopted to make data warehouse design faster and nimbler. They divide a data warehouse project into sprints (iterations), and include a sprint planning phase that is critical to ensure the project success. Several factors impact on the optimality of a sprint plan, e.g., the estimated complexity, business value, and affinity of the elemental functionalities included in each sprint, which makes the planning problem difficult. In this paper we formalize the planning problem and propose an optimization model that, given the estimates made by the project team and a set of development constraints, produces an optimal sprint plan that maximizes the business value perceived by users. The planning problem is converted into a multi-knapsack problem with constraints, given a linear programming formulation, and solved using the IBM ILOG CPLEX Optimizer. Finally, the proposed approach is validated through effectiveness and efficiency tests. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.