Agile development and BI

Interesting conversation going on at Slashdot about the rise of rapid prototyping tools and the increasing emphasis on fast delivery.

If somebody came to you and said "hey, I've got this great new way to build a bridge! Instead of making up plans, we'll just start building it! We'll build it out of popsicle sticks first, and then we'll go in and add some steel beams, and toss some pavement on top of that," you'd say they were insane. Nobody does stuff like that in the real world -- yet that's exactly what a lot of poorly-managed 'agile' software projects are doing. They're getting short-term prototyping gains but at the cost of maintainability and probably stability as well.

Slashdot is mostly focused on web development tools, but the same ideas apply in the Business I ntelligence world. Tools like Ab Initio, Informatica, and Ascential (IBM Websphere Information Integration? IBM still has their touch for catchy naming) enable stunningly fast development.

Fast development tempts us to try to do the rest of the project fast as well. Faster is better, except when it comes at the cost of building to the wrong requirements or writing low quality code.