I just finished reading “Practices of an Agile Developer” by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt, now don’t let the title fool you, this book is not only for developers but for anyone working on the team (yes it is for you too managers, leads and architects)One of the practices they mention is “Deploy your application automatically from the start”

This practice makes total sense, invest in building and deploying automatically, trust me this will save you a whole lot of headache later. If you are still manually building you application then beat yourself with a stick cause every manual step can lead to a mistake and hours of headache.

Not to mention you will have one guy who knows how to do it god forbid he goes on vacation and if something goes wrong your highly paid programmers will by spending hours trying to figure out what the hell went wrong and that is not a nice way to spend cash.

And with your luck it will happen in the most crucial moment. (99% SLA, Saturday night, 2 hour window to deploy anything and your application takes 2 hours to build) And don’t tell me your build cannot be automated, yes it can !! put you best developers on it and give em some time and see what happens. And if you are going to automate it start from day one.