In this series of posts I am going to talk about what it is we need to do, as Sql developers and DBAs to improve our working practices so that we take advantage of modern development patterns and practices to improve the quality of our work, the time it takes to implement features, lower the risk of deployments and have more fun as well.

This blog is focused on becoming more agile, but even in a strict waterfall environment you can still take the methods we will talk about to improve your processes, just because you have created your design up front and had it signed off, doesn’t mean that you cannot write unit tests and have an integration server, it just means you are more formal in your design, your ability to handle changes and your documentation which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

What are the steps?

Broadly speaking I think there are about 12 things we can and should so, this number might change slightly as I write the posts but we are looking at these categories:

• Development IDE
• Source Control
• Unit Tests
• Integration Tests
• Performance Tests
• Automatically deploying code changes
• Automatically deploying data changes
• Continuous Integration
• Build notifications
• Process for tracking work
• Process for tracking bugs
• Writing clean code

So here we go part 1 is already available https://the.agilesql.club/Blog/Ed-Elliott/Getting-More-Agile/Choosing-a-…

If anyone has anything that they think I have missed please let me know or share your insights with everyone via a blog or article!