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How Development Automation Can Support Digital Transformation

Forbes Business Development Council

As President of Exadel Solutions, Lev Shur leads global strategy, marketing, solution practices, sales and delivery.

When Covid-19 forced companies to stop and rethink business as usual, digital transformations rapidly accelerated, as McKinsey explains. While many were already on the path to digital, many companies behind on the trend realized it was a much better way to do business — pandemic or not. I believe it is imperative that they satisfy the demand for digital products and services because it doesn’t look like we’re turning back from this digital uprising. The resulting wave of digital activity shook up entire industries as businesses set out to either create or expand their digital footprint.  

However, while businesses realized the benefits of going digital, this sudden and rapid acceleration created many challenges. First, scaling digital transformation is not easy — especially for those with little to no digital experience prior to the pandemic. Next, many organizations lack the technical talent to successfully take the necessary steps toward digital transformation. Further, the capacity of the tech industry could be limited in the U.S. in particular due to a shortage of high-tech workers. As industries move forward, there is no easy way to satisfy the demand for digitalization and to do it to a high standard if a company's resources and talent are scarce.

As the divisional president of a software development company, I believe development automation is one way to help address this challenge: Using tools and processes that automate routine tasks allows development and engineering teams to focus on creative, strategic tasks that move the needle. 

All of the automation tools and options available can make automation overwhelming for the average organization. I suggest splitting development automation into the following areas.

1. Low-code and no-code tools: These tools offer an opportunity to turn non-technical individuals into "citizen developers." (Full disclosure: My company offers a low-code tool, as do others.) Ideally, these tools should allow organizations to help close the talent gap and overcome some of the major IT roadblocks. Despite some significant advancements, there are areas that these tools do not cover. What they offer in simplicity and speed of development, they generally lack in flexibility and customization for more complex cases. Strong, technically skilled developers are always going to play an important role in digital transformation; however, these tools can empower teams to build digital products and services when they have limited resources. 

2. DevOps and test automation tools: Today, organizations have access to a wide variety of tools that facilitate the development process from cradle to grave. When development and QA are not bogged down by as many manual processes, a limited IT team will still able to deliver software that can drive the organization forward. Having an effective stack also helps remote and distributed teams efficiently and cohesively build digital products and solutions. 

3. Agile methodologies and technical agility: While most leaders already know about the tools above, I suggest looking beyond them to improve your agility. At its best, an agile approach allows a team to quickly adapt to change while preserving software quality. But being truly agile is about more than methodologies. No matter how you structure your team (using Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, etc.), the process only gets you half of the way to being agile. In other words, you likely won’t succeed unless you are also technically agile. Let’s spell it out: 

• When a software development project is facing issues (weak requirements, technical debt, too many bugs, etc.), the typical solution to this is usually to add to or create processes (more documentation and additional reporting) and then ask the team to follow those processes. In other words, the fix is to apply solutions to people but not technology. But in order to solve the root cause of the problems, companies should also create or adopt solutions that improve technical agility.

• To address this, first combine technical solutions and processes. Instead of relying on team members to memorize and execute new additions to their processes, build technology that facilitates better processes. Second, adopt development automation. After you understand what you want to automate, you should make sure that your automated processes give you a higher degree of technical agility rather than just solving a process problem. If you have properly executed these two steps, the process and the end product should be more easily adaptable.

• The technical solutions that automate development can come in many forms. For example, you could automate testing so that it runs in parallel with development and not at the end of each sprint. Or you could automate your project setups so that processes, repositories, user permissions and so on are set up quickly and efficiently, thus minimizing mistakes and missed steps while facilitating reuse and increasing technical agility.

The past year changed the IT industry forever as digital transformations scaled at a rapid pace. To help accommodate the demand for digitalization, IT teams can look for ways to implement development automation. Many tools and processes are available to offload development teams' work so they can focus on strategic and value-driving tasks. IT leaders should work with their development teams to find the right blend of tools and agile methodologies to keep digital transformations on track.


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