Re: What is your database application development environment?

Paul Nichols (TeamB) wrote:

What
we will normally do, is use a small dev database for initial
development, then switch to the Test or QA database for optimization,
even before we promote to QA.

Initially, both our Dev and QA processes used smaller databases. Then
we switched QA to a larger database. We still found that we were doing
considerable amounts of rework that could have been avoided if we'd
developed better code initially.

Stored Procs usually go by a DBA before being pushed into QA.

What's a DBA? Oh wait, I think they want me to be the DBA.

Our company has had 3 - 5 developers for the past seven years. For a
while, one of those developers was focused on SQL Server and learning
everything he could. He was moving away from development and toward
more of a DBA role/expertise. After he was laid off, the database
responsibility fell to me.

I wish we had a dedicated DBA. But for our small team, we all do a
little of everything.

Nothing wrong with your approach, but I find most companies have much
less hardware or CPU cycles available for dev.

We're an ISV. We do write some small tools for in-house use. But our
primary development is on a commercial product that we sell. Our
development machines and servers are the most powerful computers in the
office.

Your company may
have DEV boxes or CPU cycles that closely resemble QA and production.

Unfortunately, our dev boxes are still only a faction of what our
customers are using for production servers. Except for the new one,
which should get here any day now. It's a dual proc, with
hyperthreading, 2.8 Ghz and 4GB. I can't wait...

Some companies also have a Dev, Test, Staging, and Production
environment.

I think that meets our environment. Our Dev environment is our local
development workstations, each running SQL Server Developer.

We have a shared Test server that is shared between QA and Dev.

We have an isolated Test server that's on a separate server/domain, and
only QA has access to update/modify the server.

We have a production server for each version of our software that we
support (currently three versions). Our support team uses the
production "servers". However, they're actually virtual machines
running on a single server. So our "production" environment is the
slowest of them all.

QA and Prod were under CHange Control and Promotion Teams.

Right now, I play a round-robin role. I have the final say on our
database schema, although each developer writes their own DDL and
submits it to me. I'm the StarTeam/Change Control administrator,
although I'm slowly transitioning the role to QA. And I'm a Senior
Developer, primarily responsible for the architecture of the
application.

We all laugh when we go to conferences where speakers talk about the
conflict between DBAs and developers. Ah, to have teams that size...

If we have bugs in QA, it went back to Dev and Test, and the
procedure began anew. Good version control is a must here, on all
environments. So are roll back plans.

This is how we're working today. We've come a long way. We actually
have Modification Definitions approved by a review board. We actually
track source code changes for each Modification Definition. QA
actually tests the new functionality against the Modification
Definition. We actually have a monthly code review of all new code
checked in for the past month.

We spend much less time coding these days. But we seem to be getting
more done, closer to on time and on budget. Strange how that works...

--
Jon Robertson
Borland Certified Advanced Delphi 7 Developer
MedEvolve, Inc
http://www.medevolve.com
.

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