At least two post-development process automation practices have arisen, either as a result of some incremental development methodologies, or merely at the same time: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (or Deployment).
Development practices
Continuous integration
Continuous Integration (CI), in its simplest description, is a repeatable, automated process for merging new or altered code into a common, shared environment, either on some sort of timed basis, or as a result of some event such as committing changes to a source control system. Its primary goal is to try and detect potential integration problems as early in the code promotion or deployment process as possible, so that any issues that arise can be...