Agile Won’t Scale Without Automation: Error-Prone Processes

This is part three of a five part series where we will present five distinct challenges that if left unaddressed will drastically reduce an organization’s ability to gain the benefits promised by a move to Agile development methods. There are many explanations why manually initiated, slow-running build-test-deploy procedures are much more likely to experience failures. These include: • Human-induced errors • The rigors of harmonizing diverse, non-standardized environments • Attempting to synchronize primitive tools in parallel operations • The sheer number of builds required by Agile techniques One of the best ways to diminish errors is to discover and correct them before they even occur. Automation makes it easy to validate the software build-test-deploy process up-front, using reproducible systems. Designers can configure and provision different build paths with a single click, thereby streamlining and speeding the essential task of setting up these important jobs. Come back next week for the fourth installment of the 5 week series continuing with disparate techniques.