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Introduction

Over the last two decades, many application development teams have adopted Agile development practices and have immensely benefited from it. Delivering working software frequently, receiving early feedback from customers and having self-organized cross-functional teams led to faster delivery to market and satisfied customers. Another software engineering culture, called DevOps, started evolving towards the middle of this decade and is now popular among many organizations. DevOps aims at unifying software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). Both these software engineering practices advocate automation, and two main concepts coming out of them are Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). The purpose of this article is to highlight how Database Change Management, which is an important aspect of the software delivery process, is often the bottleneck in implementing a Continuous Delivery process. The article also recommends some processes that help in overcoming this bottleneck and allow streamlining application code delivery and database changes into a single delivery pipeline.

Continuous Integration

One of the core principles of an Agile development process is Continuous Integration. Continuous Integration emphasizes on making sure that code developed by multiple members of the team are always integrated. It avoids “integration hell” that used to be so common during the days when developers worked in their silos and waited until everyone was done with their pieces of work, before attempting to integrate them. Continuous Integration involves independent build machine, automated builds, and automated tests. It promotes test-driven development and the practice of making frequent atomic commits to the baseline or master branch or trunk of the version control system.

Source: DZone