Refining software development: Why you need to embrace automation in deployment

Technological advancement and voracious, uncompromising, and often informed consumer demand has pushed businesses to sink considerable resources into refined software development undertakings. However, the software development lifecycle comprises various time-consuming stages that induce undue stress on IT teams.

Against this backdrop, savvy CIOs have steered their IT teams in the direction of continuous improvement and continuous delivery (CI/CD), leveraging automation in software development operations. As a result, teams can create software products with the added benefits of fewer manual tasks and bugs, plus a more agile development cycle.

This article explores this refined approach – often referred to as automated deployment – to discuss its various plus points.

What is automation in software development environments?

The frequently volatile business environment has necessitated significant data collection and analysis to gain a competitive advantage in the market. Consequently, IT heads have implemented automation in various ways to enable staff to adequately handle the growing complexity of IT operations and cloud infrastructure for flexibility and scalability.

For instance, several IT-savvy organizations have embraced automation in software development in the form of cloud automation, resource provisioning and network management. In addition, this approach has spanned out to network management as well as security automation operations like monitoring and response.

Furthermore, the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning has opened new frontiers for applying automation in software development endeavors. These and related offshoot technological developments create smarter solutions for IT heads and decision-making executives to react to changing business environments.

As such, automation provides several benefits for software developers, enabling them to build workflows faster for more efficient product and update deployment. For example, developers can use CI/CD automation pipelines running on specific conditions to execute certain desired actions on their code.

Benefits of automated deployment in software development

Automating primary actions during development and deployment provides several plus points for the dev team and the organization. Indeed, Gartner’s IT Automation Trends for 2022 show that, by 2024, organizations will lower operational costs by 30 percent by combining hyper-automation technologies with redesigned operational processes.

The benefits include:

• Improved development efficiency: Often, non-automation-oriented IT departments encounter various differences between product performance during production works and performance during development and testing.

After all, aligning both environments requires relatively significant manual input from staff. Consequently, it’s considerably riskier to encounter dissimilarities between development plus testing and production environments.

As a solution, automation allows developers to build bespoke environments mirroring various product or testing requirements quickly.

• Increased innovation: Savvy IT heads relieve their staff of work-related stress by going the automated deployment route. Instead of spending significant time executing manual tasks, developers can focus on more cognitively-demanding duties like coding and developing new product features.

Additionally, automated deployment tools clean up workflow and process clutter, stimulating department-wide unhindered productivity.

• More robust system security: Digital products contain different intellectual property and sensitive information, creating a need for robust security to safeguard these assets. Therefore, traditional manual approaches to software development present several opportunities for system breaches.
  However, applying automation in software development processes allows CIOs to safeguard IT assets, including products and the general infrastructure.

Looking to scale and add value to your digital products through automation?

Let the experts at ASB Resources guide your software development and deployment efforts. Schedule a call with one of our experts today.