Everything needs to be fast. It’s a reality of life now; same-day delivery, instant downloads, seven-minute workouts and short-form content rule our lives. So it’s no surprise there’s a demand for more speed in continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).
Lucky for us, speed doesn’t entail your teams working faster and harder. Automation promises to relieve this consistent pressure for more and provide a much-needed upgrade to the industry. So, how can we harness automation to its full potential?
Why Is CI/CD Important?
A key element of software development, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) focuses on ensuring the highest level of speed, quality and reliability in software delivery. Streamlining the software development cycle facilitates quicker deployment and fixes in a high-speed environment.
How To Introduce Automation to Your CI/CD Pipeline
If there’s anything we hate these days, it’s inefficiency. And without automation, CI/CD is simply not meeting its full potential. Consistency and reliability, the lifeblood of the industry, get a major boost when the likelihood of human error is decreased. Imagine being able to detect errors earlier than ever. Oftentimes, we find a fault in the plumbing only after the walls are built. But when automations are properly calibrated, we can catch leaks before they become harder — and more expensive — to fix.
With the benefits clear to see, implementation is a no-brainer. But implementation can feel like scaling Everest, so here are some tips to set you up well for the climb.
Take Stock of Your Team
Though uncomfortable, your team will likely need to undergo some adjustments as big changes like this are made. We can forget the now-old worry that AI will replace us all, but new integrations do require taking stock of our resources.
Today’s business landscape requires new skills in tech, no matter the sector. The testers of yesterday had different skill sets, which often don’t line up with the abilities necessary for today’s coding testing engineers. This gap includes a vast array of technical skills, such as programming in various languages, database knowledge, and SQL abilities. Examine which members of your team are up to this task, who can learn, what resources you have to teach, and where you’ll need new team members. To really take automated CI/CD seriously, teams will likely need to change. This is an unpleasant task that is nevertheless key to long-term success.
Pick Your Battles Wisely
Automation is exciting, but we can’t get carried away. Work with your team to audit areas of concern and need in your pipelines. Where do you most need automation, and where can it have the biggest impact in reducing human intervention? Which process do you want to tackle first and use as a role model?
Not everything that can be automated should be. Think like a small business; don’t go all in at once just because resources allow it, but rather, start conservatively. Heavily repetitive tasks are usually a good place to begin. Assess the complexity of automation in each case, the manual effort needed to execute it, and the direct benefits. This can be a simple way to rank and target tasks that are good candidates.
Of course, sometimes you can’t cut human intervention out. Tasks that involve subjective judgment, such as usability verification, likely can’t be fully automated. Don’t force automation where it doesn’t fit. The good news is that automation is flexible and ever-evolving, so choices aren’t set in stone. Nevertheless, the first implementations should be well-selected to set a good tone.
Choose Your Weapons
Many tools, such as Jenkins, Selenium, GitLab, and CircleCI, exist to integrate automated testing into the pipeline. There are also a wide variety of solutions to help prepare your environments, including Chef and Ansible. “Overwhelming” can seem like an understatement. Honestly consider your budget, capabilities, needs and limits.
Based on the areas of concern you selected, maybe the big packages aren’t worth it, and you can get away with basic tools. Or maybe you need something more all-encompassing to ease the change.
The name of the game here is flexibility. Don’t get too attached to any one tool or think that you can only use one. Your team should be knowledgeable in many different areas and be able to adapt to new tools as needs change (hint: they will!).
Test Your Socks Off
Now comes some grunt work before you can sit back and enjoy some automation. In CD, we need to ensure that the auto-deployment of fixes are reliable and quick. We need to establish validations of success. Decide what success looks like for your particular use case and determine how to measure it. Metrics could include fewer bug reports, faster response times, improved stakeholder feedback or reduced human intervention.
Regression tests are some of the most common validation methods, yet many organizations struggle with defining and maintaining them. They forget to verify that regression testing is actually having any impact: Is it finding bugs or issues? If not, test something different. Sometimes no news is indeed bad news.
Another key step is smoke testing, preliminary checks to ensure that everything works on a basic level. If foundational elements aren’t working, every subsequent automated step will be thrown off, creating the false impression that automation itself is the issue. To maintain effective testing, every step surrounding automation needs to be consistently checked and validated. Take the testing stages seriously, and make sure they are customized to your specific needs. Don’t cut corners here.
Don’t Forget the Bigger Picture
It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in the process of implementing shiny, new tools and get a little carried away. Before implementation, examine with your team how your tools interact with each other and what each is meant to do. Map out your plans and how they work with the cloud, how they affect security, and if each step is really necessary.
Facebook learned this the hard way, when it rushed to automate its content moderation. The company placed too much trust in AI-driven systems that weren’t ready to operate independently, leading to a slew of falsely tagged content and harmful results. Diving in too deep, too fast without keeping an eye on realistic capabilities spells disaster.
Automation doesn’t work in isolation. It must be integrated with other important systems which need to be considered as a whole. Sometimes, less is more. This is also an important conversation to have consistently, not just at the start.
A Streamlined Future
One thing I love about this kind of tech is that it’s only becoming more and more accessible. Prices come down and more teams can manage to implement and take advantage of automation. What exists now as 10 tools from 10 different providers will likely be one clean tool in the near future. With the right team beside you, built with intention, further transitions and changes will be a breeze. It can certainly be a daunting process, but once the first steps of integration are behind you, the number of headaches avoided will be well worth it.
