Emergent database design: liberating database development with agile practices

Many agile projects do not apply agile practices to their database development. Common wisdom dictates that the entire data model be carefully designed up front and protected from change thereafter. We believed the common wisdom as well. But the clash of traditional database practices and agile development practices caused us significant pain, and hamstrung our ability to deliver the most business value in each iteration. Once we recognized this pain, we abandoned the conventional wisdom. Incrementally, we applied agile discipline to our database development, eventually reducing up-front design work to just-in-time work that matched our 1 to 2 week development iterations. This paper summarizes our experience.