Probing Into the Essence of Fully Automated Development

Deployment automation enables creating a fully automated pipeline to verify if your software works as intended upon deployment. Organizations embrace digital transformation and leverage it to deliver better service from happier employees at a lower cost.

What Practices Should You Follow To Improve An Organization’s Processes?

Automate the development process of new applications. Design them in an automation-friendly way. Refactoring is a part of automation. It will not make any sense if refactoring is not there. Also, if it deals handovers from one team to another, it would be a waste of effort, even if it involves automating individual pieces.

What Is A Fully Automated Enterprise?

A fully automated enterprise applies automation to whichever process they find most relevant and can have an impact. It finds the right balance between what software tasks robots can take up. It implements AI to every facet of work and contributes to cognitive processes to automate more.

But, What Stops Companies From Going Fully Automated?

Companies try automating small processes but face problems while integrating them without an overarching pipeline that joins those pieces into a fully automated process.

Not much is accomplishable this way as the whole process still needs to wait for handovers and (often long) manual actions.  The main reason behind this missing pipeline is the lack of responsibility for a product. Every step in the Software development lifecycle introduces manual approvals and handovers.

SDLC Automation

Software development life cycle (SDLC) automation revolves around continuous integration and continuous delivery. It helps in – (1) securely storing and versioning the application’s source code, and (2) automatically build, (3) test, and (4) deploying your applications to AWS or your on-premises environment. Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) implement fully automated verification of the acceptance environment to determine the scenario of whether the pipeline can continue to production or not.

‘Automated Testing Lifecycle Methodology (ATLM)’

1. The decision to automate test scripts
2. Test automation tool acquisition
3. Introducing the ‘automated’ testing process
4. Test planning, design, development
5. Test execution and management
6. Reviewing test program, and assessment

Benefits of Continuous Integration (CI)/Continuous Deployment (CD)

• Build Faster
• Decrease code review time
• Automatic
• Faster fault isolation
• Additional deployment features

What is Automated QA?

Automation testing helps in (1) continuous integration and (2) continuous delivery – developing and deploying software multiple times per day, rather than in stages.

Difference between Manual and Automated QA Testing

Automated QA testing entirely depends upon specialized tools to execute test cases and generate results. Manual testing relies on a written test plan and reports the defects to developers. But manual and automated testing can be used concurrently.

Manual testing is ideal for assessing the user experience (UX) and how the application seems to the end-user.

Automated testing runs on frameworks and is suitable for large-scale applications. It is more accurate than manual testing, as there is no or very little human intervention. It saves time in regression tests, where many tests are executable in a module, which is tedious for manual testers.

Automation scripts are reusable, but manual tests are non-recordable. Automation tests help in repeated execution testing and successive development cycles. Also, automation tests run 24/7 without the need to have a manual input.

How Does Automated Testing Work?

Automated QA testing occurs in stages, in consensus with the Software Development Life Cycle:

1. Define the scope – what testing aims to achieve and how you plan to do it.
2. Choose an automation tool – according to the technology of the app.
3. Design a strategy – with a test automation framework, common practices, testing tools, standards. It also includes data-driven, keyword-driven, linear scripting, modular testing.
4. Set the environment – for testing and maximize test coverage across multiple scenarios.
5. Write a script – to perform the tests based on actual requirements and scripting standards. It should be reusable, structured, and easy to understand. Make use of Selenium WebDriver, Appium, and Android monitor to create your automation test scripts.
6. Execute the tests – with graphical user interface testing or application programming interface testing.

Why Choose Deployment Automation?

• Deployment automation tests if the new feature works as expected via unit or integration tests. You can also deploy your application to a ‘real’ environment and monitor behaviour with all tools and dependencies.

• Deployment automation detects bugs that are hard to find thru manual testing or testing methods. It offers instant feedback and bug tracking report. Such insights help save time and faster bug detection in future.

• Deployment automation improves accuracy and nullifies opportunities for human error. It increases velocity by automating build processes, testing, and deployment workflows for developers and allows organizations to release new features faster.

• Organizations should adapt to ever-increasing speed to develop the software. Many technological innovations improve the (1) building, (2) testing, and (3) shipping software. Deployment automation creates a competitive advantage and propels the organization forward.

• It focuses on deploying software automatically to different environments, running checks against your software, and pushing the software build to protection with limited or no human intervention.

• Deployment automation configures the software testing environment. It sets the specific configuration for your testing environment. It deploys the software build to the configured environment and runs tests against the deployed software.

• If all tests pass, deployment automation pushes the software build to other environments to run further checks.

• Deployment automation and continuous deployment are a great match.

• It spins the testing environment without DevOps.

What Are The Three Best Practices For Deployment Automation?

• Continuous testing – To deliver the software at the earliest, including checks to roll back to a previously working code change when tests fail. Include End-to-end testing, performance testing and exploratory testing into it.

• Configuration management – It is pertinent to have a version control system for storing and making changes against your environment’s configuration. You get more visibility into how your configuration has changed, and it eases audit configuration issues.

• Monitoring and logging tools – It allows setting alerts to detect issues with your application. It alerts you when an application deployment fails.

When to Opt For Deployment Automation?

Setting up the environment, software deployments, provisioning databases – take up a lot of time. As deployment automation helps in all these tasks and improves the execution accuracy, it helps organizations focus on coding instead of repeating DevOps tasks.  Moreover, you can combine deployment automation with governance rules to get even more control over your production environment.

Essential Capabilities for Automation Technology

• Automation technology offers limitless possibilities for increasing efficiency and productivity.
• It assists in capacity, bandwidth, better decision making, interoperability, easy troubleshooting, maintenance, and robust security.
• Automation technology helps convert more leads by automating marketing processes like emailing specific contacts, scheduling campaigns, and posting on social media.

Automating Software Development with Deep Learning

What would you prefer? Food prepared by humans or the same kind of meals prepared by machines. Humans can be inconsistent, but ‘machines’ measure perfect consistency, adding randomness and less appealing human-centric operation. The market and the need at the core decision-maker whether they prefer better quality or experience, incongruity or logical decision making.

Conclusive: The Future of Automated Software Development

Robots can be fast but might take more time, energy, money with less return on investment than is desirable. Robots are still pretty complex to implement, but rapid improvements in artificial intelligence and robotics technology help reduce iterative tasks, augment workforce capabilities significantly by improving throughput and reducing latency. It drives productivity, safety, profitability, and quality. Automation also bolsters connectivity, reliability in the hyper-competitive ecosystem. It is promising, accessible, and scalable. Reach out to us for managed app development services or applicable quotations!