Start Automations by Manually Doing

Fleeting

• see,
  • experience vs theory fallacy,
  • dogfooding,
  • often the system is perfectly designed to generate the result it did,
  • good tool is a tool you don’t even notice,

I see plenty of supposedly automation tools that end up not being used. People doing the automation often complain that their client don’t use them. I think that is because they write a tool without understanding what it feels like to use the tool or what it feels like to have the issue that the tool supposedly fixes. In the end, several users will rather deal with the issue than with the tool.

I warmly suggest that people that guess they need to automatize stuff start by doing the stuff by hand, then after some time feel the urge to automatize and start writing some automation.

I think that a programming language such as python helps in there, because it is often Easy, Attractive and Timely. Then people can start automatizing stuff and see the problem start to fade away.

Also, the fact that people that need the automation write their own automation allow them to decide when they reach the compromise where automating is enough and manual stuff are acceptable. By trying to automatize everything, we spend a lot of time on stuff with low value.

I guess that technical people should thrive to provide pieces of tools that help non technical can bring together to automatize.

Permalink