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Blog Archive 2005-December 2005-November 2005-October 2005-September 2005-August 2005-July 2005-June

Thu, 30 Jun 2005

Why Automate Anything?

I saw Eric Armstrong's blog this morning. He posted about a new tool called Jackpot that I'm not sure about just yet. It would have a great deal more value to me if it was being created as an Ant task instead of NetBeans module, but that's another story. :)

What caught my eye was a story he told about why you'd want to automate. The story is ~great~ so I've included it here:

Early in my career, I saw my mentor (a certain David Smith), become outraged when keypunch operators were spending hour after hour making changes to files that could just as easily have been programmed. "Sure," he said to the project manager, "You don't mind doing the job with manual labor, because you're not the one who's doing the work." His reaction reflected a deep-seated appreciation for the value of human effort that turned out to be contagious.

It has been many years since I first heard that, but it's a lesson that always stuck with me: Never do large amounts of mindless, repetitive work if you can possibly get the computer to do it for you.

When you think about it, it only stands to reason:

• The computer will work all day and all night, never taking a break, without complaining.
• The computer will do what you told it to do, with no mistakes, at high speed.
• Once you've taught the computer how do to the task, it doesn't forgets. You can ask it to do the same thing next year, and every year thereafter.

Wow! And that's why we automate! Not only does it make our life easier, the computers are just better at repetition than we are!

What should we automate? Everything we do more than three times is a good rule of thumb. Here are some candidates.

• Product Builds
• Testing
• Building and Testing All The Time

What categories of automation have you found valuable? Send me more!

posted at: 12:16 | path: | permanent link to this entry