“Every software development team should have a fully automated deployment process.” That’s according to pretty much everyone I meet at conferences and events. It’s not even a debate. It’s a declaration. In actual fact there are only a small percentage of software development teams who have a ‘one-click’, totally hands-off, fully automated deployment process. Many teams have a partially manual deployment process and most have an entirely manual process. Why aren’t you doing it?

If automating software deployment process is such a ‘no-brainer’, why aren’t more people doing it? My theory is that development teams are not doing it because they perceive the overhead of creating, setting-up, configuring and maintaining an automated deployment mechanism to not be worth the potential short-term benefits “Setting-up automated deployment will take forever! It’ll steal time from developing the actual software my team has been assembled to create!” “Our deployment process has so many moving parts, how do I even begin to automate it?” “It’ll just drain energy from our developers – who would rather be solving business problems and not writing scripts to copy files across a network.” You’ve probably heard colleagues (or yourself) say something along these lines. This perceived overhead can become quite a sinister obstacle. It may seem so large and insurmountable, that the development team don’t really know where to start when tackling it.

One way of overcoming this is being very clear on what the benefits of doing so are. So, without further ado, here are the 5 big benefits of deployment automation that we’ve seen in our team since automating our processes. Lectra System Modaris V6 Software Developer there. The 5 Big Benefits #1: Deployments become much less error-prone and much more repeatable Manual deployments are error prone. This is because it involves humans doing stuff, so is governed by: if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. Important steps in a release can be accidentally missed, faults that occur during release may not be spotted, the incorrect versions of software can be shipped and broken software ends up going live. If you are lucky, you’ll be able to recover from this quickly.

If you are unlucky, well it’s pretty embarrassing at best. Automated deployments don’t suffer from variability. Once configured, the process is set, and will be the same every time a release is initiated. If it works the first time you deploy your software into a given environment, it’ll work the 100 th time. #2: Anyone in the team can deploy software With an automated deployment process, the knowledge of how to release your software is captured in the system, not in an individual’s brain. Performing manual or partially-automated deployments are often the responsibility of a small subset of people in an organisation.