Automation is everywhere these days, from our emails to our phone apps. However, not everything that uses automation is created equal, and it’s important to understand what settings you should use for each particular type of software.
Most software developers know that the more automated a process is, the faster it can be repeated and the better it will perform. While there is a place for automating certain processes in software development, such as the build and deployment of your applications, too much automation can easily cause problems. It’s important to find the right balance between automating tasks and letting your team work through them manually.
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Build And Deployment Is One Area Where Too Much Automation Can Hurt
If you’re a developer, you know how important it is to have a properly functioning build and deployment process. The first step is to ensure that you have the necessary tools to compile your application correctly. Next, you need to make sure that these tools are always kept up to date, and finally, you need to have good testing coverage before your code is accepted for production.
This is all well and good, but it can be tedious to have to run these processes manually. As a result, there is a place for automation in the build and deployment of your application. You can use several different tools to help with this step, such as Jenkins for continuous integration and deployment, and Docker for containerizing and distributing your application.
Using Too Many Services To Manage Your Applications Is A Red Flag
Your applications are important to you and your business, so it’s essential that you have good tools to manage them. There are several different services out there that can make managing your applications easier. For example, you can use Google Apps for business email or Office 365 for your company’s file sharing and storage needs.
The issue is when you start using too many different services to handle the mundane tasks of application management. If you’re using several different services for each aspect of your business, you are bound to have duplicate data and extra overhead when managing applications. It’s better to use one service for each function. Using several services for one task is usually a sign that you are trying to over-engineer the solution or that you are not familiar enough with each service’s capabilities.
Manual Testing Is Key
Even though you might be using automated testing tools to test your applications during development, nothing can replace proper manual testing. After all, no amount of automation can catch all the bugs that might creep in during testing or deployment.
Proper manual testing ensures that your application functions as intended and removes any glitches before your customers even discover them. There are several different steps you can take to properly test your application, including but not limited to:
- Unit testing (i.e., testing individual pieces of code)
- Integration testing (i.e., testing how the different parts of your application work together)
- Functional testing (i.e., testing that your application does what it’s supposed to do)
- Performance testing (i.e., testing how fast your application is)
- Security testing (i.e., testing whether your application is secure)
- Usability testing (i.e., testing whether your application is easy to use)
Proper manual testing is not easy and takes a lot of time. However, given the number of applications that are being created daily, this is often the only practical option. Otherwise, you might be tempted to cut corners and use automated testing tools, which can cause more problems than they solve.
Monitoring Application Performance Closely
It’s important to monitor the performance of your application closely while it’s in development and testing. This ensures that you don’t launch the product to customers with serious performance issues. You can use several different tools to monitor the performance of your application, including but not limited to:
- New Relic for tracking applications’ performance over time
- Google Analytics for tracking traffic and analyzing performance
- Collectd for sending performance data to
- Graphite (a tool for making graphs from performance data)
- Honeycomb (a tool for easily searching and reviewing server logs)
- Livestream (formerly Knownas Zulily, a tool for monitoring your applications’ performance)
- JMeter (a performance testing tool)
- Pingdom Analytics for checking the performance of various pages and applications
- Squid analytics for similar tasks
The development and testing of your application is a complex and time-consuming process, so it’s essential that you have the necessary tools to monitor its performance. A reliable and trusted tool, such as New Relic, can help you keep track of all the different metrics that matter, so you can quickly determine if and when your application stops performing up to par.
The Final Word
In the end, all these tips and tricks for managing applications effectively are simply suggestions. Ultimately, you have to decide how best to integrate these tools into your workflow and which ones you should utilize depending on the nature of your business. As always, personal preferences matter too.
For example, if security is a key concern, you might want to utilize two-factor authentication for all your customer portal requests or employ security testing throughout the development process. If fast and reliable application performance is a priority, you might want to look into New Relic’s free tier or Honeycomb’s business version.
As you can see, there are several different tools available to make managing applications easier and more effective. If you want to get the most out of these tools, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the different features they offer and find the one best suited for your needs.