I recently started in a consulting company after graduating, and was put in a small team of colleagues at a client. I'm asking what "Low Hanging Fruits" are easiest to pick for a newbie entering a new team, or a team that has been used to doing things a certain way in the past.

A little background information about the "Applications" that have been developed in the past. They are very database driven, with most business logic in database procedures and functions(makes sense for a number of reasons). As of now I'm the only one delegated 100 percent to development of new features, the rest of the team juggle maintenance tasks and customer interaction between development of new features. Scrum is somewhat utilized with backlog, planning and whatnot.

A couple of things I have implemented so far

• Previously all builds and testing was done locally and code was stored in SVN repositories.
  • I have migrated these projects to Git repositories and set up a CI server for builds and testing.
• Previous Java projects were Java EE(EJB)
  • The new one's I'm developing are Spring applications.

So back to the question. What "Low Hanging Fruits" would you recommend? It could be anything from using a certain IDE/Database tool/Clipboard manager, testing techniques, to utilizing a development method. Anything you have learnt or used that you feel could save someone from tedious work or increase learning pace.

For example. As of now all database changes that are going in production, gets tested adequately in development, then gets added to a change script that get's run once a month or so.

I know there's a number of strategies for solving database changes, which have worked out for you?

​