When we say that professionals in the DevOps field are responsible for implementing task automation—such as automated testing and automatic deployment—many people still fail to grasp the benefits of such tasks. So, let’s delve a little deeper into this topic.
In a development workflow without DevOps solutions in place, it’s very common to observe the following process:
Development of part of the system > Deployment > Testing (if any) > Bug creation
The main problem with this workflow is that it fosters feelings of helplessness among the development team, which generates negative factors for individuals and inevitably leads to harmful effects on deliverables. Implementing a workflow that minimizes this sense of helplessness will benefit the entire company.
Continuous Feedback!
The key to creating a more efficient workflow that also helps reduce the feeling of failure in teams is constant feedback! Workflows that allow issues to be identified even before reaching the manual testing stage make all the difference. Let’s illustrate a basic DevOps workflow:
Task development > Merge Request creation > Code validation pipeline > Deployment > Testing
In this workflow, we add an automatic code validation step to identify syntax errors and prevent the creation of future rework tasks if an issue were identified during manual testing—or worse, in the production environment by the client, which would lead to much greater strain on the team and the client relationship.
We can conclude, then, that automation benefits the individuals working on the project, the client (who will have a more reliable and productive system), and the company as a whole—since it will likely spend less on code maintenance and can focus more on evolutionary tasks!
Reference: DevOps Handbook (2018)
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