Developing Agile Applications Using Iterative Database Design Model

Abstract

Software development are becoming more complex day after day, customer requirements becomes more complex and changing a lot, and software development methodologies are trying to respond to those emergent business needs and requirements. One of the major business needs of nowadays is the ability to quickly respond to business requirements and changes. Therefore, the software development process has been moved to be more agile by using what has been agreed to call Agile Software Development Process. Such agile methods, XP and Scrum for example, have been widely used lately instead of the traditional software development methods such as Waterfall and Spiral. However, the business still needs to store data, and Database Management Systems (DBMS) are still the de facto for the business software. DBMS relying completely on Database Design process that follow traditional up-front design process which is sequential by nature. The Data Analyst needs to develop a complete Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) which is a result of a normalization process that generates the tables and their relationships. This research developed a model that integrates the database design techniques with Scrum Agile practices. The new model did not sacrifice the features of the database design techniques, yet the model helped to make the database design process more agile by distributing the database design process among the Scrum development process. We evolve our new model by using Focal Point approach and then adding an Abstraction Layer at the database level which contains business logic related to data implemented using stored procedures and functions, and we find that this helps to reduce the impact of the changes implemented at the database level and to achieve the goal with percentage around 64% of the time needed to achieve the same goal using the traditional upfront design. This is in addition to the flexibility of the new system when it comes to adapt new changes since the results showed that the new model is around 80% more flexible than using upfront design approach.