Advanced git Branching Model for Power BI

The session
Introduces in theory and practice a git branching model supporting collaborative incremental releases for Power BI datasets and reports.

The model is collaborative: it is designed for multiple team members working jointly on a shared set of changes.

It is designed for incremental releases: Those continuously deliver business value with a regular and reliable release cadence and allow the product manager, the develop team as well as stakeholders to refer to a particular feature set using a shared versioning scheme.

Using both the source control as well as deployment capabilities of pbi-tools (https://pbi.tools), this model was developed by Mathias as part of building and growing a distributed data management team and was continuously improved over multiple iterations.

Join the session to learn how it works, the thinking behind, and how to adopt it for your own workflows. Foundational understanding of source control and CI/CD is recommended.

The Speaker:
Mathias Thierbach
Head of Finance Systems at YouGov Plc and Developer of pbi-tools
In 2015, after having spent over ten years as a Software Developer and Architect with Microsoft technologies, Mathias Thierbach moved into the Microsoft BI space. He soon landed on Power BI, but also realized quickly that the development and engineering tools and practices were nothing like the ones well established in software development. This is how pbi-tools started as a project, the only complete source control solution for Power BI.

Today, leading a growing data management team at YouGov, he experiences the benefits of those efforts every day. Having open sourced the project in fall of 2021, Mathias spends a lot of his free time bringing source control and DevOps practices to the wider Power BI community now.

In addition to his open source engagements, Mathias cares deeply about his role as an enterprise technology leader. Like many, once having started as a single contributor technologist, he had to pivot significantly when he moved into a manager role, responsible for building, stabilizing and growing a team of data engineers, analysts and architects. Mathias is now passionately sharing the many experiences and learnings that came out of that journey with the community.