I was working at IBM when I discovered JUnit, Design Patterns, Refactoring and Pragmatic Programmer. These all gave me a bright idea how to deal with a specific problem in my programming group. There is a database group that acts as gatekeeper to the database schema for our product. Since the product has several hundred tables, I can appreciate the desire for conceptual integrity by having a small group of like minded people oversee its design. Unfortunately, for the most part, the database gatekeepers do not criticize design, rather they merely control change. This change control leads to problems on both sides: sometimes I have to wait five business days for the testing group to see changes; sometimes my changes are “lost in the translation” and made incorrectly by one of the gatekeeper’s teammates. This sets the context for my decision to do something radical: develop the database schema last. It is radical because in that organization, the database was — and may well still be — the center of the universe.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.thecodewhisperer.com/permalink/persistence-last