Revisiting Schema Evolution in Object Databases in Support of Agile Development

Based on a real-world case study in agile development, we examine issues of schema evolution in state-of-the-art object databases. In particular, we show how traditional problems and solutions discussed in the research literature do not match the requirements of modern agile development practices. To highlight these discrepancies, we present the approach to agile schema evolution taken in the case study and then focus on the aspects of backward/forward compatibility and object structures. In each case, we discuss the impact on managing software evolution and present approaches to dealing with these in practice.