Scale or fail. Tips for tech startups that want to scale effectively.
December 30, 2021
Blog > Automation, Productivity, Scalabilty, Startups | Valentina Cupać
Scale or fail. Tips for tech startups that want to scale effectively.
How should you SCALE your tech product company to grow EFFECTIVELY?
Short Answer: Automate your software delivery, wherever possible. Why? So that your teams won’t have to WASTE endless hours on manual repetitive time-consuming activities.
LONG ANSWER:
1. AUTOMATED BUILD. Using a CI/CD pipeline means that developers won’t have to manually build the solution for deployment, and won’t have to spend time manually checking if the build works after integration.
2. AUTOMATED TESTING. By automating regression testing, it means that developers and QA Engineers won’t have to waste hours manually repeating the same tests over and over again. Time-consuming and low-value activity. (Instead, QA Engineers can do more creative exploratory testing). Furthermore, as the product grows the number of regression tests increases too, so manual regression testing is non-scalable.
3. AUTOMATED DEPLOYMENT. By automating deployment, it means developers won’t have to waste time doing manual deployments. Furthermore, as there are more features developed, then in order to be able to verify & validate, it would require more and more deployments throughout the sprint. Manual deployments are non-scalable.
4. AUTOMATED CODE REVIEW. Do you want your tech leads doing manual code reviews – which could be partially automated (so that they can spend time on higher-value activities)? This is where tools integrating SonarQube into CI/CD pipeline really becomes useful, because they can automate a subset of code reviews that would have otherwise been done manually. It’s a huge time saver regarding code reviews by automatically checking code standards.
SUMMARY
Automation enables tech companies to scale. 1. Your existing teams will be able to achieve more, by automating manual work. 2. You’ll be able to grow your team more effectively so that you don’t hire more people to do manual work but instead to do more meaningful value-added work.
