An Agile Development Question (for Scott)

[Jay Damon]

Scott,
I just finished reading the 1st chapter of your book off the web. It looks like a must-read for me. It's reassuring to know I�m not the only one who values generalization in this era of task specialization.
I currently am responsible for the DAO class layer for an insurance application. For months I have been begging management to allow me manipulate our database tables directly, i.e. create new tables, add new table columns, and delete existing table columns only.
The reason I want this capability is because our architecture team has an unfortunate tendency to do such changes en masse at the beginning of an iteration not to mention submitting additional database changes every other day or so. Consequently, it is difficult to keep the DAO layer in sync and the other developers, while understanding, are often frustrated by this. In some cases, I am not informed or aware of the changes until something breaks.
Perhaps I am reading what I want to in the excerpt from the book, but it seems to me that Agile Development would suggest that I should be performing the necessary changes on �both sides of the fence�, i.e. to the Java DAO classes AND the DB2 database tables, to minimize the disruption to other developers. I certainly am qualified (see certifications below) to do both. Would you agree or not?
Jay Damon
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SCJP2, SCWCD, SCEA (Part I)
ICED WebSphere v4 & v5
ICSE WebSphere v4 Administration
ICSE DB2 v7.1 Development
ICSE DB2 v7.1 Administration

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Jay Damon:
Perhaps I am reading what I want to in the excerpt from the book, but it seems to me that Agile Development would suggest that I should be performing the necessary changes on �both sides of the fence�, i.e. to the Java DAO classes AND the DB2 database tables, to minimize the disruption to other developers. I certainly am qualified (see certifications below) to do both. Would you agree or not?

I am not Scott, but your description matches my understanding of Agile development.
And if management think it's to risky to allow you to do it all for yourself, you should at least be allowed much closer collaboration with those who are allowed. Bringing the database in line with the classes controlling the access should be a matter of hours, not iterations!