Software Development Automation

Automation at this SDLC stage is very complex and challenging due to the subjective nature of requirements and the need for human input and interpretation. Still, we use tools to automate software requirements collection, analysis, and documentation.

• Atlassian Confluence, Trello, or Asana as a centralized repository for all requirements. These tools reflect updates and changes instantly and allow stakeholders to collaborate in real time, significantly reducing misunderstanding and rework.
• Microsoft Visio and Enterprise Architect for a visual representation of requirements through diagrams and models.
• Jira for tracking and managing tasks and sending automatic updates to all participants.Head of Business Analysis at ScienceSoft

Automation tools can streamline the creation of UI components, animations, layouts, responsive designs, and architecture diagrams.

• Reusable components and libraries. We employ tools like Material-UI and Bootstrap for reusable buttons, forms, navigation bars, and other UI elements that can be used across different parts of an application.
• Auto-animation tools. We use tools like Adobe XD to create smooth transitions and micro-interactions without extensive coding.
• Auto-layout and responsive design tools. Tools like Adobe XD, Figma, and Sketch help us create interfaces that adapt to different screen sizes and orientations without manual adjustments.
• Modeling tools. We use tools like UML for validating model consistency and generating diagrams from models.

We help clients achieve their software coding goals with greater speed, efficiency, and quality by integrating the following automation tools and methodologies:

• Low-code platforms like Microsoft Power Apps. Low-code platforms provide a visual, drag-and-drop interface for building applications. This allows software engineers and citizen developers to quickly create and modify app components or entire applications without writing extensive code. Low-code platforms are perfect for building applications with a limited number of user roles and straightforward business logic. Commonly, low code is beneficial for developing standard employee portals, intranets, productivity tools, resource planning systems, decision validation apps, audit tools, B2C and B2B portals, mobile apps for employees, customers, and partners, as well as software prototypes.

• Integrated development environments. We use Eclipse, Visual Studio, or NetBeans to streamline coding with features like auto-completion, syntax highlighting, and debugging.
• Unit testing tools. Our developers use JUnit, NUnit, PyUnit, or TestNG, to write test cases that check the functionality of specific parts of their code and then run those tests automatically.
• Version control tools. We use tools like Git, Team Foundation Server (TFS), or Apache Subversion to automate code branching and merging, automatically track every code change, and facilitate code reviews.
• Serverless computing. We use services like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions to run code in response to events and automatically manage the underlying compute resources (including their provisioning, scaling, and maintenance).
• DevOps and DevSecOps. As the overall automation approach that ties it all together — integrating version control, IDEs, test automation among other things — DevOps is not a last-minute effort for us but the main framework we rely on. DevSecOps extends this by incorporating security practices into the DevOps process, ensuring continuous security through tools for dependency checking and static/dynamic code analysis. We embed security into the CI/CD pipeline from the outset with tools like Snyk for dependency checking, SonarQube for static code analysis, and OWASP ZAP for dynamic application security testing (DAST).

QA automation involves writing and running code-based test scripts to simulate user and software interactions. At ScienceSoft, we go for test automation frameworks that offer robust support and flexibility. It means the frameworks should support multiple programming languages and browsers and offer a wide range of plugins, extensions, and integrations with other tools. For automated UI testing, we typically use Selenium, Protractor, and Appium. For automated API tests, we rely on JMeter and Postman. Additionally, integrating Selenium with Cucumber can be highly effective for implementing behavior-driven development.

Automation tools can assist in deploying software parts to various environments, such as development, testing, staging, and production. At this stage, we apply:

• Continuous Integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, CircleCI, Azure Pipelines, AWS CodePipelines, and AWS CodeDeploy to automate the building, testing, and deployment of applications. For a mid-sized software development project involving several microservices, an API layer, and a front-end component, ScienceSoft typically requires 3–5 weeks to develop an efficient CI/CD pipeline. With our established CI/CD processes, we can integrate, test, and deploy new software functionality within 2–3 hours.
• Containerization tools like Docker to package applications into containers, ensuring they run consistently across different environments and reducing the time and effort required to deploy applications.
• Orchestration tools like Kubernetes to coordinate containers, enhancing reliability and scalability.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform and AWS CloudFormation define infrastructure as code, allowing for easy reuse of infrastructure setups. This helps us quickly set up new infrastructures, easily scale resources up or down as needed, and dynamically allocate resources to optimize costs.

At this stage, ScienceSoft helps to integrate the following tools into your workflows:

• Monitoring tools like Nagios, Zabbix, and Datadog to automatically monitor network services, hosts, and devices. We help to determine comprehensive monitoring requirements (which systems need to be monitored, what metrics need to be tracked, what benchmarks should be established, etc.) tailored to your business needs, set up extensive monitoring configurations for diverse environments, ensure agents are correctly installed and communicating with the central server, fine-tune alert thresholds to avoid overwhelming teams with false positives, and create intuitive and informative dashboards.
• Log analysis tools such as Logstash, Splunk, Graylog, and Logmatic automatically analyze logs for issues and potential failures. We help create accurate parsing rules for various log formats and ensure search queries perform well on large datasets.
• Configuration management tools like Ansible, Chef, and Puppet to ensure consistency and reduce the chances of configuration drift. We assist with writing and testing scripts that accurately reflect the desired configurations, managing configuration versions to avoid conflicts and ensure consistency, and more.
• Patch management tools like WSUS and SCCM to keep systems up to date and secure without manual intervention. We help to ensure patches do not break existing applications or systems and coordinate patch deployment to minimize downtime.