This week I had the chance to deliver a talk at Agile West in Las Vegas. I linked some resources on my blog, and feel free to check them out.
Tl;Dr – Start with deployments
After the talk, I had an interesting question from someone in the audience. This person had a lot of developers writing code and then sending to a DBA, who executes it in SSMS. This was for SQL Server development, and that’s a common way many companies deploy database changes.
Even companies that have software developers who embrace DevOps will still tend to work this way.
This is error prone, inefficient, and it’s not the way to build better software. We know that DevOps produces better software if you adopt it, and we know that you can’t forget the database. That’s integral if you want to be a high or elite performer.
My advice for many companies is that they start with deployments. If you have some manual process or DBAs involved, often they’re just running a script you produced in some way. What I’d do is start adding Flyway Community (or Teams/Enterprise) in and putting those scripts into a folder (hopefully in Git) and naming them as appropriate. That’s a small change for DBAs or Ops people deploying code, but it starts to enable a process.
From here, I can alter this process to use tooling (Azure DevOps, Bamboo, Jenkins, etc.) and continue to put scripts in a location. Then I can work backwards and start getting developers to build better processes for capturing and saving code.