The reduction of developer toil through automated processes
In the world of engineering, we often perform the same actions over again and again. We see this type of work every day – a systems engineer deleting temporary files from a server to prevent hard drives from filling up, or a developer manually uploading files every time an application is deployed. These items, which are repetitive, can often be automated, saving time spent on manual tasks and human interaction – when this happens, we reduce developer toil.
When we look at our pipelines, we see example after example of the reduction in toil. By adding SAST security scanning, credential scanning, and unit testing to a pipeline, these functions run automatically. If they fail, we simply break the build – and then a developer finds out why:
Figure 10.5 – Examples of pipelines addressing toil
If we repeat this process again and again, for everything from writing scripts...
