On startup when default configuration is set (while other configurations are available), a popup should be presented to the developer if it is intended to use the default configuration or that perhaps a different configuration should be used. Or maybe just display the list of available configurations so an alternative can be picked for startup.
Now, on first checkout from version control the configuration is set to default (and I even believe this sometimes just happens). However it is easy to forget to set this configuration option to the proper value. So when starting the application, it just starts building to finally figure out the database does not exist. This is wasting valuable development time, especially with a big monolithic applications.