Automation for Efficiency and Quality

Of the factors in the CALMR (Culture, Automation, Lean Flow, Measuring, Recovery) approach, automation is the one most associated with the DevOps approach. A great deal of energy is devoted by DevOps practitioners to keeping current on trends in technology for environments and tooling. These tools, with different functions, are tied together to form a toolchain or pipeline.

We start our look at different types of tools in our pipeline by looking at the foundational tool types every pipeline needs. This includes Agile project management, version control systems, and review/documentation tools.

Continuous Integration (CI) tools stem from build management utilities. We will examine tools that create builds and other types of tools that run when a build is executed. These include automated testing tools, packaging tools, and artifact repositories.

An extension of CI is the deployment of build packages to staging and production environments...