I worked in an Agile team in 2000 and we deployed changes to our web platform every Wednesday for over 18 months. That was about the length of time I was involved before the small startup failed, but not for lack of technology. In fact, I managed a few weeks extra pay by helping sell and deploy our IP to another company.

Deploying regularly and often, to meet business needs and get features into the hands of customers is important. For most businesses, this is something the CTO and CEO want. It can work, and there’s a case study with Nmbrs, a Redgate customer, that has used DLM with this quote:

“The productivity of the team has improved dramatically. We were doing one database update a week, which took almost a full day. Now it takes ten minutes. We can spend the extra time we’ve gained developing new features.”

That’s been my experience with tooling and automation. If you get things setup, as I did with my startup, then you gain confidence in deployments, are willing to make them more often, and get these small chunks of software to customers on a regular basis. It’s not just customers, as we found we could make some fundamental changes in databases and applications that helped smooth development later without affecting customers.

I know I’m paid by Redgate to talk about DLM, but the concept, the idea, the processes really do work well. They’ll help you get features to customers quicker (and feedback to developers faster) as well as give you confidence that you can release, if you find an issue with your application.

Filed under: Blog Tagged: DLM, software development, syndicated