Agile Won’t Scale Without Automation: Disparate Techniques

This is part four of a five part series where we will present five distinct challenges that if left unaddressed will drastically reduce an organization’s ability to gain the benefits promised by a move to Agile development methods. Even in the most rigid, hierarchical organizations, there’s a good chance that each software development team has evolved its own routines, systems, and set of tools. By extension, this means that every piece of delivered software was created using a unique, non-repeatable process. To further complicate matters, today’s software development teams are commonly dispersed throughout the world, and rarely share best practices. Automation furnishes everyone with a centralized and standardized approach for sharing and reusing common procedures and workflows. This simplifies matters for users and administrators alike, and promotes widespread best practice dissemination. Well-designed supporting technology also recognizes that heterogeneity is inherent in modern software environments: it’s simply unrealistic to expect everyone to standardize on a single platform, development environment, and so on. Come back next week for the final installment of the 5 week series concluding with limited insight.