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    <p>We were already using <a href="http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">TeamCity</a> (an excellent continuous integration tool) to do our builds, which included unit tests. There were three big improvements were mentioning:</p> <p><strong>1) Install kit and one-click UAT deployments</strong></p> <p>We packaged our app as an install kit using <a href="http://nsis.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">NSIS</a> (not an MSI, which was so much more complicated and unnecessary for our needs). This install kit did everything necessary, like stop IIS, copy the files, put configuration files in the right places, restart IIS, etc. We then created a TeamCity build configuration which ran that install kit remotely on the test server using <a href="http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">psexec</a>.</p> <p>This allowed our testers to do UAT deployments themselves, as long as they didn't contain database changes - but those were much rarer than code changes.</p> <p>Production deployments were, of course, more involved and we couldn't automate them this much, but we still used the same install kit, which helped to ensure consistency between UAT and production. If anything was missing or not copied to the right place it was usually picked up in UAT.</p> <p><strong>2) Automating database deployments</strong></p> <p>Deploying database changes was a big problem as well. We were already scripting all DB changes, but there were still problems in knowing which scripts were already run and which still needed to be run and in what order. We looked at several tools for this, but ended up rolling our own.</p> <p>DB scripts were organised in a directory structure by the release number. In addition to the scripts developers were required to add the filename of a script to a text file, one filename per line, which specified the correct order. We wrote a command-line tool which processed this file and executed the scripts against a given DB. It also recorded which scripts it had run (and when) in a special table in the DB and next time it did not run those again. This means that a developer could simply add a DB script, add its name to the text file and run the tool against the UAT DB without running around asking others what scripts they last ran. We used the same tool in production, but of course it was only run once per release.</p> <p>The extra step that really made this work well is running the DB deployment as part of the build. Our unit tests ran against a real DB (a very small one, with minimal data). The build script would restore a backup of the DB from the previous release and then run all the scripts for the current release and take a new backup. (In practice it was a little more complicated, because we also had patch releases and the backup was only done for full releases, but the tool was smart enough to handle that.) This ensured that the DB scripts were tested <em>together</em> at every build and if developers made conflicting schema changes it would be picked up quickly.</p> <p>The only manual steps were at release time: we incremented the release number on the build server and copied the "current DB" backup to make it the "last release" backup. Apart from that we no longer had to worry about the DB used by the build. The UAT database still occasionally had to be restored from backup (eg. since the system couldn't undo the changes for a deleted DB script), but that was fairly rare.</p> <p><strong>3) Branching for a release</strong></p> <p>It sounds basic and almost not worth mentioning, yet we weren't doing this to begin with. Merging back changes can certainly be a pain, but not as much of a pain as having a single codebase for today's release and next month's! We also got the person who made the most changes on the release branches to do the merge, which served to remind everyone to keep their release branch commits to an absolute minimum.</p>
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