How to improve your

team’s productivity by

Automating
Software
Delivery
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Table of contents

03 Why automating your software delivery matters

03 What is automated software delivery?

04 Automated software delivery improves productivity by...

Eliminating unnecessary manual work
Reducing context switching
Detecting issues earlier
Protecting productivity
Improving employee retention
Simplifying onboarding

08 Unleash your team's productivity

08 GitLab for automated software delivery

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Why automating your

software delivery matters

Fully automating your software delivery process can help your

organization reach many of its strategic goals — and set you up to
take on initiatives that may currently feel out of reach.

With automated software delivery, you can:

• Improve your team’s productivity and the efficiency of your
software delivery process
• Get better visibility into team performance and areas for
improvement
• Enhance collaboration across teams and reduce duplicate
efforts
• Give your developers a better experience
• Make every change releasable
• Improve the reliability of your applications What is automated
software delivery?
• Boost deployment frequency and the overall velocity of your
software factory
• Speed up your cloud native and multi-cloud adoption Automated software delivery is a set of practices that help
teams deliver high-quality, secure applications more regularly
In this guide, we’ll drill down on how you can improve productivity and efficiently. It includes source code management, continuous
and efficiency with automated software delivery. integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), automated testing,
and GitOps. These are the essentials required to get started or
improve the maturity of your DevOps adoption.

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Automated software delivery

improves productivity by...

Eliminating unnecessary manual work Some of the manual work your

At a typical company, software developers spend a sizable amount of time team can stop doing:
on repetitive, manual tasks — tasks that could be automated or eliminated
with automated software delivery. • Setting up test environments
• Running test scripts
• Waiting for review comments
As the amount of unnecessary manual work decreases, more of the • Testing on local environments
developers’ time is freed up for use on more impactful and productive • Manually creating backups
work. That can help improve your development velocity, the quality of • Deploying to production
your code (you’re removing a lot of opportunities for human error, after
all), and make your entire software delivery process more efficient.

Reducing context switching

The more manual processes and different tools there are in your software
delivery lifecycle (SDLC), the more times your team will have to stop and
start what they’re doing, switch interfaces, wait around for things to finish,
fight a fire, and more.
“On average, people report spending 36 minutes every
That’s context switching. And all of it is lost productivity and efficiency — day switching back and forth between applications. And
and it’s probably frustrating for your team too.
they report taking on average 9 and a half minutes to
With automated software delivery, you can reduce the amount of context get back into a good workflow once they’ve switched
switching your team has to do. Giving your team the freedom to focus on
between apps.”
a single task will make them more productive and efficient, and potentially
less likely to get burned out too. — Workgeist Report ‘21,
a report by Qatalog and Cornell University’s Ellis Idea Lab

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Detecting issues earlier, when they’re There are a few reasons for this:
potentially easier to fix
Fixing code you wrote can be easier and more efficient when
With automated software delivery, you’re building security and 1 it’s still fresh in your mind. When an issue isn’t caught until much
testing into the early stages of your development process. This later, you may need to re-familiarize yourself (or someone else in
means your team will be detecting and fixing bugs and security your team) with the code in order to fix it.
issues as they are created, not when code is ready to ship or
already in production. If an issue isn’t caught the same day it was introduced, the
2
person who needs to resolve the issue may not be the person
Catching issues earlier in the SDLC can make them easier and who wrote the code. It will inevitably take them longer to fix
faster to fix, and makes your team more productive and efficient. someone else’s code, and they might have a different approach
and may even try to re-write the code.

When you notice an issue or bug in recently pushed changes,

3 there may be less to wade through to find and fix it. But if lots of
other changes have been made since the one that introduced the
problem, it can be harder to separate the issue from everything
else. It will take more time to fix the issue than if it had been
caught sooner, or you may decide to just roll things back to the
last known good version before the bug was introduced — but
then you’ve just undone a lot of productive work.

Bugs and issues that aren’t caught until they’re in production

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could have a particularly devastating effect on productivity
because they may cause a full-blown fire that will likely interrupt
the entire team and take multiple people to fix. In addition, you
may experience an unscheduled production outage, which will
affect your revenue and customers.

Plus, detecting and fixing issues earlier in the SDLC can help protect the
productivity of other teams in your organization.

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Protecting the productivity of your customers Sales

and other departments Your sales team can be most productive and efficient when they can
focus on getting potential customers to see the value of what you’re
The benefits of automated software delivery can extend well beyond
selling and decide to do business with your company. If your salespeople
the teams in your organization that write and ship code. As you
have to spend time talking with prospects about a bug or security issue
automate your processes, you won’t just be helping your team get more
they heard about or about how the timeline for an exciting new feature
done — you may even be improving the productivity and efficiency of
has changed, that’s not only unnecessary work that makes them less
other departments in your organization, as well as the customers who
productive — it could also mean they’ll sell less than they would have
use your software.
otherwise.
Here are a few examples:
Customer Success
Support Delivering software with defects or failing to deliver software that keeps
up with your competitors can encourage your customers to look for
Bugs and security issues that make it into production may lead to a
alternatives, and that could make life that much harder for your Customer
flood of tickets and calls for your support team. Plus, any other less
Success team and anyone focused on customer satisfaction and retention.
urgent bug fixes — or new features — that would have made the lives
of your support team easier may take longer to make their way into
Your customers
production.
When you automate your software delivery, you’ll likely be delivering
Marketing & Public Relations software with fewer defects and with new features (that address
customer needs and feedback) faster and more often — potentially
Automating your software delivery processes may help your marketing
helping customers who use your software increase their own productivity
and public relations (PR) teams’ productivity. Fixing issues faster and
and efficiency by spending less time submitting support tickets, retrying
well before you’re ready to deploy helps you hit your planned launch
things that should work or worked last time, and creating workarounds to
dates. This can help keep your marketing team from having to do
get the software to do what they need. When you do what you do faster
extra unnecessary work to adjust everything they’ve been working
and more reliably, your customers may also be able to do so.
on (emails, events, social media posts, press outreach, etc.) to a new
timetable. And by fixing bugs and security issues before they make it
out into the world, you may be keeping the marketing and PR teams
from having to do damage control and communicate the issue to
customers, analysts, and press. It can also be easier to market and
get press to write about more exciting features and solutions that you
released before your competitors.

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Improving employee retention and ability to hire

Losing valued team members is hard — especially if they're leaving for
preventable reasons such as a constant pile of manual tasks or difficult-
to-use legacy tools. Automating your software delivery processes means
you can create a better employee experience for the teams building that
software.

Here are a few ways automated software delivery can help keep your team
members productive and engaged:
• Allowing the team to focus on other and perhaps more valuable work,
instead of repetitive manual tasks that could be automated
• Reducing the number of fire drills from bugs and security issues that
were caught late
• Giving your team more modern technology and processes to work with

And the same things that can help you retain members of your team can
help you recruit and hire new ones. Savvy developers will do their research
and ask questions during the interview process to suss out what the job
will be like — such as what technology they’ll get to use, if the company
has embraced modern software development practices, and how much
frustration they might run into with manual work and fire drills.

Simplifying onboarding so employees can be

productive faster
The simpler it is for a new employee to learn the process and tools your
team uses to develop and deploy software, the faster they can become
confident and productive members of your team.

Automating your software delivery process can help you substantially cut
down on the number of manual tasks and various tools your team has to
learn and try to remember to do their work. This can make many other
aspects of the process more efficient — especially for new employees.

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Unleash your
team’s productivity

Automated software delivery is your ticket to unleashing your

team’s productivity and making your software development
lifecycle more efficient. Free your team from manual work so
they can focus on value-generating work that will get noticed.

GitLab for automated

software delivery

With GitLab, you can automate your software delivery lifecycle

with one single license, one permission model, one interface, and
one data model to deploy software to multiple clouds — so your
team can focus on creating business value instead of managing a
complex toolchain.

Learn more about automated software delivery with GitLab.

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