Like the automotive industry, software development faces the challenges of a sub-optimally tuned build cycle. Bottlenecks can systematically occur in the development pipeline, causing the overall process to become unbalanced. The most vulnerable, in terms of delays, stages are making changes to the code, testing them, and deploying them. To eliminate delays, and in general, to speed up and automate the entire process, various techniques are used; one of the most effective is DevOps https://relevant.software/devops/ (Development Operations).

DevOps is a specific culture, a set of interdisciplinary practices, the main goal of which is to unite everyone involved in software development into one team for continuous code integration and rapid delivery of applications to the user. The DevOps culture relies on the CI/CD (Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery) methodology and CI/CD-optimized tools: GitLab, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.

Why is automation so important? - because in our case it is a synonym for saving. CI/CD implies conducting auto-tests at an early stage of the build: the earlier an error is found in the code, the less likely it is to go into production. The US National Standards Institute (NIST) estimates that the cost of fixing a bug at the final stage is 30 times higher than at the design stage.