Automation of end-to-end build, deployment and application test automation processes become critical to ensure the tested components and dependencies make their way to production in a repeatable and reliable manner. A well orchestrated Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline plays a critical role in ensuring the successful movement of code through automated testing cycles and through environments. Implementing CI best practices to manage software Infrastructure, Application Delivery & Test Automation development requires a heavier lift with changes to organization culture in addition to appropriate skill sets. More importantly, it takes time to adapt and internalize the culture within an organization. In our opinion, the first step in this journey should be to establish CD pipelines that can start with unit tested software and push it through deployment, verification and automated testing cycles. In our experience, developing and maintaining a test automation framework provides a better long-term ROI compared to supporting manual testing processes for applications. While setting up the initial framework and automation will take additional effort and time upfront, it is completely worth it based on the reliability and savings they offer over time by supporting multiple release cycles with incremental additional effort.

• Embrace the principle of "Shift-Left" testing in the product lifecycle so that total software development effort and thereby costs can be reduced by using continuous and automated test methodologies. This cost reduction can be achieved as a result of enabling a constant and compressed feedback loop between developers, testers and end-users as part of an integrated product lifecyle
• Enable flexible pipelines and automation framework using open source platforms so the customer can maximize the use of "No-Code/Low-Code" constructs and develop specific plugins to only cover any special testing requirements
• Integrate automated testing with the version control system so that the processes to build, deploy and test are automatically triggered based on developer actions such as a request to merge code into the appropriate branch