Riley Major looks at small things you can do to help smooth out deployment processes:
It’s not just about exercising restraint, though. It’s also about taking small additional steps to minimize the impact of new development. If you are making a new stored procedure parameter, can you provide a default so that its omission will make the procedure act as before? If so, you can now deploy that change without affecting any consuming code. If you are changing the name of a column, can you create a computed column with the old name which simply mirrors the original column’s data? All insert- and update-related code would still need to change, but you could save the SELECT statements for the next round.
Ideally, these steps are transitory. Optional parameters can be made mandatory once all of the consuming procedures have been adapted. The legacy-named computed columns should be deleted once all old queries are updated. But recognize that this might not happen. Other priorities come up, and these supposedly temporary constructs can linger.
Click through for additional hints.