Automating Your App Development Workflows

According to a State of Agile report, 71% of teams adopt Agile and DevOps practices into their workflows to meet quick turnaround times without affecting software quality.

Automation tools are an integral part of the Agile+DevOps system, which improves development speed while eliminating manual errors and inefficiencies from the software development life cycle (SDLC). Its influence is only growing as many industries become believers in the benefits of automating development processes to help meet team initiatives and business goals.

So, what exactly is development automation? And how is it changing the app development game?

Development automation: An overview

Development process automation is a DevOps approach that is exactly what it sounds like...it focuses on automating development processes. Dev teams can significantly reduce software development time while reducing bottlenecks and errors and realizing overall cost savings. The prime candidates for DevOps automation are development processes like integration, code review, testing, deployment, and monitoring.

However, automation for the sake of automation is never a good idea. Instead, build automation around the dev team’s requirements, which can vary across companies and industries. For example, an app development team that has the sales team as stakeholders will have different priorities and metrics they’re trying to reach than teams that support healthcare or social media apps.

This means starting by identifying the steps in your development process and checking whether they meet the following development automation criteria:

• Are they repetitive and manual processes?

• Are they human error-prone?

• Are they time-consuming?

• Are they resource-intensive?

• Are they frequent and scalable?

Making sure processes meet the criteria first ensures you reap all the benefits of automating the development process:

• Eliminate human error by automating manual tasks like code review and data entry.

• Deliver more consistent results during software development by streamlining repetitive tasks.

• Make scaling easier when you grow your business.

• Optimize communication between teams and departments.

• Boost productivity and free dev teams up to focus on the meaningful work they enjoy.

Examples of automated development processes

While complex decision-making isn’t always able to be automated, many steps in the development cycle can become powerful tools when automated, going beyond their initial purpose.

Automated testing

The core principle behind continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) is “build fast, test fast, fail fast,” and automated testing plays an important role. Automated testing removes manual testing processes using test scripts to run checks on a feature or requirement before pushing them to production.

Automated testing takes less time than traditional manual testing, reduces human errors, and catches bugs that may have gone unnoticed. However, it only works for repetitive tasks. So it’s mostly used to automate tests like unit tests, regression tests, load/performance tests, and user interface (UI) tests.

Automated code review

The source code is the lifeblood of your project, and a code review worked into your business processes before deployment helps identify any bugs and security issues. However, manual code reviews are time-consuming. Automating code review can drastically speed up the process, giving developers ample time to fix the bugs before deployment. Moreover, automated reviews detect bugs more reliably and ensure the code is up to the mark.

Automated code review tools are designed for three circumstances:

• Static analysis tools to scan the source code for security vulnerabilities and ensure it meets industry standards before moving to production.

• Dynamic analysis tools to test the code in real-world situations to see how they perform.

• Code comparison tools to ensure consistency across two source code versions.