I strongly agree with this. Relatively recently, I did a major migration to clean up some weird account states that we didn't want to support anymore, so we could launch a new feature. I spent some time writing all the SQL queries to do the migration, went into staging, ran them... and found that there were a lot of edge cases that weren't handled correctly. It was terrible. I decided to abort the SQL statement approach, and just wrote a somewhat-complicated program with extensive unit tests to handle the migration. The tests exercised the edge cases and ensured that they were accounted for correctly in the migration. (And we had time to come up with a real plan for each of them.)
When the time came to do the cut-over in production, we had a war room, ran the program, and it was all over in seconds. Everything worked perfectly and I honestly felt a little dejected how boring the most major change we had ever made as a team went. I had hyped myself up for some stressful debugging, hair pulling, restoring things from backups... but it was all over and done with perfectly in a few seconds. I didn't really know what to do with the rest of the day. It worked! Major new feature! Back to work.
I try to make all future "major" migrations equally boring. The time you spend debugging things in development is time you don't spend with production being down. Worth it every time.
When the time came to do the cut-over in production, we had a war room, ran the program, and it was all over in seconds. Everything worked perfectly and I honestly felt a little dejected how boring the most major change we had ever made as a team went. I had hyped myself up for some stressful debugging, hair pulling, restoring things from backups... but it was all over and done with perfectly in a few seconds. I didn't really know what to do with the rest of the day. It worked! Major new feature! Back to work.
I try to make all future "major" migrations equally boring. The time you spend debugging things in development is time you don't spend with production being down. Worth it every time.