Raising the Bar
I believe that the agile software development community is in the process of generally raising the bar within the IT community. We're rethinking software development, adopting forgotten practices from yesteryear such as pair programming and active stakeholder participation, and introducing new practices such as continuous regression testing and refactoring. Due in part to the reduced feedback lifecycle, as well as a greater focus on quality, agile software developers are clearly becoming more productive than their traditional counterparts.
Not only is the bar being raised for application programming, it is also being raised for database development. The greatest challenge concerning modern techniques such as database regression testing and database refactoring is apathy amongst the data management community. Luckily, this may not be an issue much longer. Endeavors such as the Eclipse Data Tools Platform (www.eclipse.org/datatools/) and Microsoft's Visual for Database Professionals (msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio /teamsystem/products/dbpro/) are starting to provide the tools that developers require to support agile database techniques. These tools enable developers to perform common data management tasks in minutes, which may have taken days or weeks in the past. In short, the agile community appears to be reinventing data management, and they're doing so in such a way as to improve both quality and responsiveness to change. My fear is that the apathetic among us are not only being left behind, they may even be risking unemployment.
