Why Automation Matters : Taking a step backward to move forward!

 

There was a small thread on Twitter today about unit testing, which I’m going to extrapolate to automation generally.

There can be a certain reluctance towards writing unit tests. I guess the thinking goes, I’m here to write code and solve problems, not waste time writing test code. Unit test quality and code coverage varies, but it’s not unusual to hear people say their unit tests have more lines of code than the code they are testing. I guess that adds to the reluctance. What some people fail to see is once the unit tests are written, they may never have to manually test that code again. If the code changes over time, the unit test may only need a few small tweaks to bring them up to date. Over the lifetime of the project, that initial investment can represent a massive saving…

This is true of many aspects of automation. Yes, you can create a new database in a few minutes by clicking some buttons on a GUI, and that’s fine when you get one request a week. What happens when developers want a new database for every test they run? Your button presses don’t scale. If instead you automated the process, you would never have to manually create a database again, and developers could build and burn databases to their heart’s content.

You could be the gatekeeper who runs scripts in the production environment, but what happens when you’re on holiday? What happens when the rate of production deployments increase? You become the bottleneck doing meaningless work. If you had helped build a deployment pipeline, those production deployments could happen automatically, with the correct governance of course.

I’ve said it before in this series, but I’ll say it again. Working in the tech industry is like swimming upriver. You can’t just stop swimming, because that means you are moving backwards. If more water is added to the river, the flow rate increases and you are overwhelmed. You have to keep trying to improve your efficiency to protect yourself against what is coming round the next bend…

I know it can be hard when you have a pressing deadline, but you really are taking a step backward to move many steps forward!

Check out the rest of the series here.

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.