Is Agile Data Science a thing now?

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How come there’s no standard text on how to operate a Data Science team? At its current scale this is a young practice without a widely accepted mode of operation. Because so many practitioners are housed in technology shops, we tend to align our delivery cycles with developers… and hence with the Agile framework.

I will argue that if a data team fits within Agile it is probably not performing data science but operational analytics—a separate and venerable practice, and a requisite for data science. To ‘do’ science we need a fair bit of leeway, although not a complete lack of boundaries. It’s a tricky balance.

In this talk I will share my experience as a data scientist in a variety of circumstances: in foundational, service, and advisory roles. I will also bring some parallels from my past life in scientific research to discuss how I think data science should be performed at scale. And I will share my current Agile-ish process at Atlassian.

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