Agile development teams are almost 25 percent more productive than their peers, according to recent industry studies. Agile development methodology allows developers to ensure “more scope delivered within the same time frame”.

With Agile development, time becomes a valuable resource. Iterations are short, and there is less time to review changes or perform rollbacks. In order to support these abbreviated, yet more frequent iterations, and ensure the delivery of high quality results in a timely manner, development teams require extensive automation. This automation should consist of a series of automated testing procedures (from regression to acceptance), as well as automated build and deploy processes, designed to keep the overhead associated with the delivery of the final “product” at the end of every sprint at a minimum.

While the need for automation is important on the application/software side, it becomes even more crucial when it comes to handling database changes. Unlike application change deployments, where developers can simply copy and replace the executables, databases contain business data that must be preserved. Therefore, the focus of database change deployment is about the path from the current state to the desired one (the output of development activities). While application deployment processes repeat themselves – new executables are copied to the correct path – database deployment is, by definition, a onetime process, since after the first deployment the current state has been changed. So a new deployment script that takes the current state into consideration must be generated for future changes.

A comprehensive database change management solution can deliver the needed automation. With the right solution in place, one that goes beyond compare-and-sync tools, to provide risk free full impact analysis, development teams can enable fast and automated deployments, nightly builds, or partial builds based on business requirements. This, in turn, can even further increase the productivity of Agile development efforts, while minimizing costs, mitigating risks, and reducing downtime.

For more on this topic, read our free eBook: In Database Automation We Trust