Agile Won’t Scale Without Automation: Limited Insight

This is part five 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. It’s a sad fact that in most enterprises, the process of building, testing, and deploying software is a‘black box’: very few people are able to explain exactly what occurs when software is delivered. Thisis a natural outgrowth of the ‘one-off’ manual processes that are so prevalent. There’s limited captureof inputs, and even less analysis of the results of this process. Any automated logic that does exist islocked away in homegrown scripts. Automation encourages and facilitates migration towards a meta-driven software delivery process. Allresults are captured and summarized at the appropriate granularity, whether at the executive, team,or job level. Keeping track of this critical information makes it much easier to identify and remedybottlenecks, errors, and other complications that can sabotage any Agile initiative.