First, I sympathize with your reaction against building in functionality that is not required. This typically causes a lot of problems. However, for a library, that is less of an issue because you aren't maintaining it. It sounds to me like the guy used what was essentially a library he had previously developed to do this and that's a step towards having the flexibility in the right place.

> Why would your way have been different? If you are using the database to store logic in, it's still logic and still needs the same level of testing as it does in code. And you don't get existing tools like VCS, release systems, staging environments to help you with that.

My largest open source project does a lot with database stored procedures. We use all the tools you mention above, and we have written some of our own tooling to make that easier. So I don't think there is any reason why those tools don't work. So you have to spend a little time on tooling? That gets paid off many times over.

> I know we're just comparing anecdotes, but everywhere I've worked the business effectiveness has been directly proportional to the extent to which they actually followed the agile principles.

There are many things that agile gets right. As a reaction against the waterfall engineering model, the emphasis on integrating design into coding is a welcome advancement. There are many other things as well.

But agile development, because of short release cycles, tends to de-emphasize design and code contracts because it comes from the assumption of changing requirements, and here it gets a lot of things wrong. You can't do agile development if you don't have a stable platform to develop on because otherwise the ground is always being pulled out from under your feet. That platform needs to be well designed, and I am not sure you can do that iteratively without a fair bit of up-front thought. This doesn't mean a waterfall (except in the area of UX). Rather it means getting the right amount of design done at each level and having the right person do it.