Automation

Increasing automation is inevitable in the way the world builds things. Why? Human labor is expensive and error-prone. Automation has proven more effective for repetitive tasks and can produce a quick payback of the initial startup costs with higher productivity, quality and cost savings.

Over the years, attempts at software automation have produced varying degrees of success but most have ultimately proven problematic or address only small pockets of the overall software landscape. In the early 90’s proprietary CASE tools had a following, but the generated code was unmaintainable and architecturally restricted to supported technologies. Today, several “low-code” environments are available, but they too are proprietary and do not offer an easy “take ownership” option.

These expensive proprietary attempts at software automation have left the IT community with skepticism, resulting in low market acceptance of automation and a continued high-reliance on hand-written code. It doesn’t have to be that way – after all, a very high percentage of code in production is commodity code, code that is highly repetitive and should be standardized for easy maintenance and predictable operation. Why are we paying developers to hand-write that code over and over again – potentially hundreds of times within a single application – and ending up with just as many variations?

The principals of Everware-CBDI have decades of experience with various code acceleration tools and approaches and have developed a vision to establish a more open, practical and sustainable software automation platform. Developed over the past 15 years, our Agile Service Factory® (ASF) is focused on the rapid and iterative provisioning of all types of software services, including Microservices.

With off-the-shelf industry-standard configurations, the ASF produces upwards of 80% of the service code deployed to production. Project architects and platform experts determine what code gets produced and adjust the ASF accordingly. As standards change over time –typical of most development, and especially Agile, projects – these project experts apply the necessary changes to the ASF configuration. This approach conforms to the leading Scaled Agile methodologies, specifically implementing the agile architecture required by larger solutions. The ASF automates most of the usual refactoring by re-producing the commodity code, significantly reducing Technical Debt. ASF automation produces “your code your way”, specific to the functional requirements in each service ready for any developer extensions which is far more effective than static code templates.

When coupled with a mature DevOps environment, the ASF increases the automation coverage into what we call “BizOps” – faster cycle time driving business requirements into deployed functionality/

In our estimation, this approach hits the automation sweet spot – automating commodity code that is often dynamic due to changing technical requirements while leaving business-specific logic and user interface code to developers. Applying the ASF to a service-oriented development projects yields higher velocity with fewer resources, higher quality, and 100% maintainable code.