Unless you fully automate infrastructure and platform provisioning, application build, test and deployment phases and have them working together in sequence, you can’t realize the ideal of continuous delivery. These ‘automation tool chains’ are a mandatory element of each DevOps environment.
The number of manual activities in the application test and release processes can cause a downstream bottleneck. Changes pile up at the end of development and unit test activities in agile development environments like SCRUM or Kanban, therefore rendering them less effective. Automation tool chains significantly improve application delivery and operations performance in DevOps environments.