Automation

1. Deployment automation
2. Test automation

Automatic deployment and automatic tests are the developer`s best friend.
An application development has three stages: Development , Debugging and Maintanance.
In the first stage you have a lot of time to spare. In the secod you have less and in the third you have none.

Automatic test and deployment save you time and bugs on the 2nd and 3rd stage , when you really need them ( need to fix the bug and redeploy by noon tommorow morning otherwise your very important customer will drop you , and just now your QA is on vacation and your IT guy is on sick day ).
But automation takes time to develop. It will elongate your development time (usually by mere few days) and automation may not be the coolest feature to develop (usually its pretty boring) ... you understand where it is going...

When you are at maintanance mode and suffers greatly from the wasted time on the manual testing/deployment and you understands the need for this , you simply do not have time to spare on building it.


Conclusion: Think ahead , in the development period , if the feature can benfit from automation down the line. If so , add the required days to the (middle) of the development period - you will thanks yourself later for doing so.