The Trouble with Templates
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I visited a company in London recently - one of the larger professional services firms - to deliver a training session to their developers. During this visit I was told this most amusing story (well, I thought it was funny).
A developer urgently needed to make a change to a business-critical database. However, when she went looking for the template on the development servers she couldn't find it. Or rather she did find it . . . 4 times. And she had no idea which, if any, was the version last released to production.
So, the developer went into production and took a copy of the database. She identified the problem, made the fix, tested it, made the database into a template and emailed it to the administrators with instructions to refresh the design of the production database.
All well and good . . . however.
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Unfortunately, the developer had not noticed that she did not have the roles necessary to see all design elements in the database, so when she took the copy its design was incomplete. As a result, when the production database was refreshed, some of the elements were deleted. Woops.
And, because the database was business-critical, the application’s failure came to the attention of senior management.
On the positive side, however, this incident did have the effect of galvanising the company into making some changes including mandating the use of a source control and versioning system – CIAO!
With proper versioning in place, it is a simple matter to identify the versions of each database sent to production, to extract the appropriate version and thus avoid the scenario described above.
Ironically this company has been using CIAO! for many years, it’s just that not everybody has been using it for all databases. This has now changed.
Has anyone else had similar experiences? And if so, would you be prepared to say so?
And, because the database was business-critical, the application’s failure came to the attention of senior management.
On the positive side, however, this incident did have the effect of galvanising the company into making some changes including mandating the use of a source control and versioning system – CIAO!
With proper versioning in place, it is a simple matter to identify the versions of each database sent to production, to extract the appropriate version and thus avoid the scenario described above.
Ironically this company has been using CIAO! for many years, it’s just that not everybody has been using it for all databases. This has now changed.
Has anyone else had similar experiences? And if so, would you be prepared to say so?