Automation of manual toil is critical in web development since nobody’s perfect and the human factor may lead to overlooking some major elements that define the success and/or the vivacity of the overall project. To avoid shutting down the whole project due to a human error, you need to envisage automation right before designing the concept. How to do that and where automation is appropriate is answered in this article.
Checklist of human errors in web development
Below is the checklist of the areas where the risk of human factors is very high, and, thus, you should automate them to the maximum.
Where automation is appropriate from the technical side?
Right organization
The right organization of the workspace is critical. In our blog, we’ve already mentioned separating dev and prod environments and why making changes in one and the same partition is not admissible. In addition, website owners or product managers should ensure their development team configures the system in the right way.
Below is a list of erroneous process organization activities accompanied by their corrective measures:
| Problem | Solution |
| Code generation on production websites (instead of using dev servers) | Using a developer machine until the code is pushed further on production. |
| System misconfiguration: all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications must be securely configured, patched/upgraded in a timely fashion | Using incident response/monitoring systems to timely notify system administrators about unpatched or misconfigured systems and enabling automated upgrades. |
Where automation is appropriate from the organizational part?
Automated workflow
Process automation is not about replacing tasks performed by people with automated tasks.
In fact, the automation of processes implies integrating automated systems and the real-time tracking of KPIs. At this, continuous integration practices play an important role. After modeling and analyzing a process, followed by its improvement and redesign, only automation allows creating control panels to track the performance indicators and resume the cycle of continuous integration in search of bottlenecks, delays, handoffs and other problems that need to be solved.
Below is a list of erroneous activities in process automation accompanied by their corrective measures:
| Problem | Solution |
| Teamwork orchestration | Version control using proper software to resolve conflicts while merging different parts of the code in the automated mode. |
| Seamless code delivery | Applying Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) practices as part of DevOps philosophy to integrate code into a shared repository and verify each integration with an automated build and automated tests. |
Read more:
DevOps Will Help Your Business Develop if Done Correctly (with cases)
DevOps Explained: All You Want To Know About Development & Operations
Closing
If your developers and testers use automation right, you’ll see great improvements that start to happen: your code gets better as human error is cut down; you get rid of more bugs accumulated due to legacy unoptimized practices; developers now can spend more time coding as they are free of manual testing. And if you need DevOps to be right in place from the very start of your project, you can rely on our team expertise.
