Modern Software Engineering Methodologies Meet Data Warehouse Design: 4WD

Data warehouse systems are characterized by a long and expensive development process that hardly meets the ambitious requirements of today’s market. This suggests that some further investigation on the methodological issues related to data warehouse design is necessary, aimed at improving the development process from different points of view. In this paper we analyze the potential advantages arising from the application of modern software engineering methodologies to a data warehouse project and we propose 4WD, a design methodology that couples the main principles emerging from these methodologies to the peculiarities of data warehouse projects. The principles underlying 4WD are risk-based iteration, evolutionary and incremental prototyping, user involvement, component reuse, formal and light documentation, and automated schema transformation.