Best Practices Discussions and Debates

I think I have learned something today that I was previously unaware.

Starting a discussion about software development best practices is akin to talking about parenting techniques with a group of mothers.  Most will patiently listen, but at least one will get super defensive and tell you in detail about why that wouldn't work with their baby.

I have relatives who are also very argumentative, in that they just love to argue.  The funny part is that they will argue about things THEY AGREE WITH!  Unfortunately, they are too bent on arguing that they don't care that they agree.

I see this happen on blogs all the time.  And while I think that blogs are great ways to spur discussion, they are not great ways to HAVE a discussion.  User groups, phone calls, and hallways are all vastly superior environments for a discussion.

In my case, I have a commenter on my blog post about best practices that is doing a wonderful job of arguing some of my points, all while telling me I'm wrong.  We disagree on one point: Developers should have their own copy of the database they are developing against, and developers should have access to all source code and software need to do their job.

I think the reason the anonymous poster and I are not able to agree is because we really aren't able to talk to each other about the ideas.  Plus, I have a strong feeling we are separated by a common language (we have different definitions of the same words).    More than likely we agree on the software, we just don't agree on the terminology.

As far as the database part: there are a ton of ideas hidden in that statement that are not easily expressed.  There are scripts that extract the meta-data out of a database, source control that houses that script, continuous integration for verifying all of the changes work to both code and database scripts, creation of development data, etc.  

Then the kicker: 90% of that is automated.  I really don't thing the anonymous submitter saw that point.  In fact that should be a blog post in itself.  He/she saw it as another backbreaking task the developer would have to maintain by hand.  But if you do it right, it isn't.  Updating the database scripts is as simple as running a batch file.   And not updating the batch file and then running it, no -- just run it.  The batch file creates the scripts for creating the entire database.  This should take 5-30 seconds.  Then you are ready to go.

As I said, there are a lot of aspect to this that were not mentioned in this post or the previous post.  But blogs are there to START discussions, not to have them.