Semi-automatic Tasks
Dilemma:
- Fully automating a task can get very hard or even impossible.
- Automation is possible but very labour intensive while the benefits are negligible, e.g. the task needs to run only once a week.
- Some tasks are easy to automate but the results are difficult to judge by a machine but easy by a man.
The solution is of course the combination of partly automated and partly manual process steps in your pipelines.
Below several methods are presented which can help you pushing your CI pipelines to the limits.
Postponed Inspection
This strategy is applicable if the execution of a task can be fully automated, but a human is required to tell whether the task has passed or failed.
Execution can run unattended, but the results of the execution have to be inspected afterwards.
Human Intervention Point
This strategy is applicable if the execution of a task requires human intervention.
At the intervention point the execution of the pipeline is suspended and the operator notified that a human action is required. At the end the execution is resumed.
This method is often more efficient than not automating a task at all.
Quick references
- SoftFab offers support for these methods.
- The section Sharing and Collaboration describes an additional way of extending your CI++ toolchain.
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