So I propose removing the requirement for a human to approve before deploying to production. This will mean that the app will be automatically deployed if all the tests in staging pass. A human will still have needed to manually approve the deployment to staging.
My hope is that by halving the number of interactions a human needs to make to deploy, we'll save time and make it easier to keep the deployed versions of our dependencies up to date.
The reason why we ask a human before deploying to production is "high risk changes or changes you could not manually test on preview you may also want to do manual testing on staging" (https://crown-commercial-service.github.io/digitalmarketplace-manual/developing-the-digital-marketplace/development-and-deployment-process.html#deploy-to-staging). However, since the Digital Marketplace is nearing the end of its life, this is no longer a significant issue. There are no plans for any further major changes. We haven't had any such changes recently.
So I propose removing the requirement for a human to approve before deploying to production. This will mean that the app will be automatically deployed if all the tests in staging pass. A human will still have needed to manually approve the deployment to staging.
My hope is that by halving the number of interactions a human needs to make to deploy, we'll save time and make it easier to keep the deployed versions of our dependencies up to date.