Data Engineering Is Not Software Engineering
10 days ago
- #data-engineering
- #agile
- #software-engineering
- Data engineering and software engineering share tools but differ fundamentally.
- Data pipelines manage large amounts of state and are tightly coupled to sources, unlike stateless applications.
- Agile methodologies don't fit data pipeline development due to lack of MVP and slow feedback loops.
- Partial datasets are often useless, and pipeline development time doesn't correlate with dataset size.
- Unit testing is impractical for data pipelines due to external dependencies and unpredictable data.
- Pipeline development is sequential and can't be effectively parallelized.
- Data teams need a lite Waterfall approach, experimentation time, and collaborative development.