Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Automate This - What to Automate

Automation

Automate This! is a series of posts about my interest in software development, automation. I'm going to start off by talking about what you can automate and what should be automated on software development projects. Since automation can be useful in more than just software development, you can rest assured I'll rant about anything else you can automate in later posts. But, enough of that little side note, lets get back to what I was talking about, automation. I want you to think back about the projects you have been on. I know it can be scary to think about some of the things you have worked on, but just keep thinking.... OK, now that you have a few projects in mind, how many of them had automated some aspect of the project. The build perhaps, and unit tests (if you actually have unit
tests!) probably are the first things that come to mind, but is there anything else your project automated? If you have had the experience I've had so far, then that is probably about all that comes to your mind.


Where to now?


So where do we go from there? What else can be automated? Is automation really that useful? I know when I first started getting into automation, these were some of the first questions that came to my mind. To answer your questions, yes, automation really is that important. Who really wants to have to remember to run the test suite, or start the build before you leave work? I know I don't, doing those by hand is very error prone. Not to mention the fact that if I had to remember to run the tests, they never would be run! As for what else can be automated, that one depends on what your project needs to have done in a consistent, repeatable manner. Making sure documentation is updated and packaged is a great process to automate, deploying your application is another great automation task. Do you have any code that is generated? Automate it!

As you can see, there really are many tasks in a project that can be automated. Since each project is different, you are going to have changing needs for what you automate. To deal with the changes from project to project, I keep a simple guideline as to what should be automated on any project I work on. If it needs to be repeated, generated, and done consistently, it should be automated.


Some Things Should Always Be Automated


Otherwise, it's really up to you on what you can and can't automate on a project. Although you may have varying aspects of your project to automate, I have found there usually is a core set of things that you should always automate
in a project. My list is pretty short, so read it


Code Generation - Anything that needs to be generated (SQL Scripts,
Web Service Skeletons, etc...)
Tests - Any tests you have, Unit, Regression, Integration, etc...
Documentation - BOTH Developer Documentation (such as Javadocs) AND
User Documentation
Builds - I don't care what you use, just automate it!
Packaging and Deployment - Usually an extension of the build, you
should automate putting the project together as you would release it to the public. If its a web application, learn how to automate its deployment to the web server and you will
thank yourself later.


Go Forth and Learn


OK, well now that we have our introduction to project automation, go out and learn more about it! Look through other projects code and learn how they handle automation and definitely learn how to use a build tool such as Ant, the ubiquitous Make, or the trendy Rake. In my next post, I'll introduce you to these three build tools and show how they are used on different projects. Until then, have fun learning your build system!

Sam