[cryptica]

I've worked for many companies that had fully automated CI/CD pipelines. If you have a good team which cares about the project, then you don't really need them IMO.

The reality of most big corporations is that nobody actually cares about the company. Executives can't trust their engineers to run the tests manually and deliver something that works.

If you have a good hiring and promotion process and a fair compensation structure (which none of the big corporations have), then you can trust your employees and so you don't need to micromanage them with automated CI/CD pipelines. In addition, if people actually care, you get much higher quality, more succinct code.

No amount of automated checking can lead to improved code quality. It only ensures that the absolute minimum operational requirements are met at any given time.

[blauditore]

> If you have a good team which cares about the project, then you don't really need them IMO.

I strongly disagree. It's not about caring or not, it's about making mistakes.

A human can easily forget to run some test, or generally one step out of many in a complicated procedure, especially if they're new to the project. A reviewer can miss a mis-formed identifier. The more is that automated, the fewer manual steps need to be remembered, and the more safety the project gets. Automated tools like CI/CD should not be considered supervisors to humans, but helpers and safety nets.

That being said, there are certainly cases where teams don't set such tools up because they come with an implementation cost. And depending on project complexity and their use case in general, it may be more economical to do things manually.

[HelloNurse]

Not using automatic tools means using a person to do a computer's job.

Programmers should work on interesting tasks: refine and revise the tool rules, add even more automatic checks, refactor and correct genuinely flagged code.

Refusing automatic check tools means lowering happiness, dignity and productivity, wasting attention and time with bad activities and priorities: following boring and error-prone procedures, finding ways to elude rules and take shortcuts, low-value and tedious detailed code reviews (e.g. discussing indentation instead of incorrect edge cases).

[blowski]

You're right that if your team is filled with people that either don't know or don't care about quality, then no amount of automation is going to help. If corporate thinks an automated CI/CD managed by a separate operations team is going to bring quality, then, yeah that's always going to fail. But that doesn't mean all and any automated CI/CD pipeline is not going to help.

I've both worked with and implemented CI/CD pipelines, as in a Jenkins script that builds a number of build artefacts and then promotes them to run in a particular environment. As part of the build process, it runs automated tests and static analysis on things like type checking, code style.

What it doesn't do is tell us which tests we forgot to write so there's no 100% cast iron guarantee that everything is correct, and I think that's what you're referring to as "improved code quality". But by having that automated step, our human QAs can spend their time on manual exploratory testing (which humans are very good at) rather than manual regression testing (which is extremely slow and inefficient). And our devs can focus code reviews on questions like "is this code clear to me?" rather than "did you meet the in-house code style?" or "have you forgotten about potential nulls?". And we can bring in contractors (who might not care so much) or juniors with a fast onboarding time, since a lot of mistakes will get picked up automatically.

If you're working in a sufficiently large organisation, one where independent auditors look at development processes, then you must have a CI/CD pipeline - either a slow, manual one or a fast, automated one. I know which one I'd prefer.

[eru]

> What it doesn't do is tell us which tests we forgot to write [...]

There are actually techniques available that help with that.

[watwut]

> If you have a good team which cares about the project, then you don't really need them IMO.

Of course as senior I do want them if I care about project. It makes it less likely for me to forget. It eliminates one of the "procedural chores" that I have to remember to type on command line.

I care about the project and therefore I do not assume that I am unfailing perfection of never making mistake or never skipping a step.

[eru]

Yes, there's only so much attention a human can pay to little details. Unburden the brain, so you can worry about subtle interactions in your code, instead of catching every last trailing space.

[rooam-dev]

"No amount of automated checking can lead to improved code quality." - Very untrue. The more automated checks (customized to your needs), the less distraction for devs and more focus on things that matter, e.g. quality.