"for example they may forget to change the connection property"

Ugh, this used to be such a pain in the keister but then someone turned our group on to using UDL's for our connection objects. Specify that they should always read their properties from the server and set a standard that they will be located in the same place and voila, all is done.

We've also done some stuff with dynamically setting file paths based on environmental variables which has also been a boon for changing between dev & production.