Costs of Human Error

Errors during deployment can become extremely costly. Some are obvious, some are not so much:

• Direct staff costs to fix the errors
• Opportunity costs of those staff while they are fixing errors
• Business opportunity costs due to missed deployment window
• Loss of revenue while systems are down

The Decision Not To Automate

We all know that human error occurs, and its costly to fix when it does. Armed with that knowledge, why does it still occur? Why do we still insist on using people to do deployments?

• A task may be too complex or costly to automate. Sometimes it is quicker to manually perform a task than to automate it.
• Oft times the task is performed by somebody who is controlling their "fiefdom". Maybe they are afraid of losing their job if their tasks are automated.
• Automating a task may require a network connection that goes against corporate policy, such as connecting to a secure system that is "air-gapped".

Causes of Human Error

Ok, so sometimes it is unavoidable to use people for some tasks, which makes human error an inevitability. There are some factors that increase the number of mistakes, such as:

• Interruptions
• Lack of clear instructions
• Fatigue
• Experience

How Tableaux Can Help

Tableaux seamlessly integrates manual tasks into its release kits. They are run and managed just like the automated tasks. This makes Tableaux extremely powerful at minimising mistakes.

• Tableaux provides a digital "war room", which helps reduce human error in two ways:
  • It reduces the number of interruptions to staff by release managers communicating with them to get status updates, etc.
  • When interruptions occur, staff involved in the deployment can recover faster because Tableaux is tracking and displaying their progress.
• Tableaux forces fine-grained documentation of the steps involved in the release. This produces more accurate instructions of the steps involved.
• Tableaux reduces fatigue because it handles many of the steps traditionally performed by staff, reducing deployment times and hence overtime.

Plenty of Automated Deployment Tools. Why Tableaux?

There are plenty of automated deployment solutions out there. But you must ask yourself if your tool of choice is designed for the rigours of software development. Most of them are geared for software "provisioning" rather than software development.

• Tableaux is good at deploying extremely complex releases to relatively few target servers (dev, test, prod). Whereas most provisioning tools are good at deploying simple pre-packaged software to large numbers of targets (such as desktop PCs).
• Tableaux offers developer self-service, so they are involved in the deployment tool from the outset.