How to Grow Time on Trees

“Automation is to time as compound interest is to money” – Rory Vaden

I heard this quote the other day and I was like “Oh man. That’s brilliant. I need to share this with everyone.”  There is NOTHING more valuable in building momentum with a development project than automating that which can and should be automated. I touched on this briefly in my article on testing automation.

Here’s a quick guide to automation in your software project.

When to Automate

The fact is that there’s a time where it’s too early to automate something. If you’re hacking around trying to decide on a particular platform or technology choice, don’t worry about automating. Once you’re beyond those very early prototypes, you should always be thinking about ways to automate.

My simple rule is: If you’ve done something twice manually, immediately look to automate it.

What to Automate

In a word: Everything. OK. Maybe not everything. But if you’re not automating something repetitive, you’re spending money.Here’s a quick list of all the things you, as a business owner, should automate as

• Testing – We’ve talked about this one already
• Deployment – We’ll get to this one, soon. I promise.
• Generating code – Yes, you can write code that generates code. Particularly helpful for integrating with APIs and such.
• Documentation – Tools like Swagger are magical for generating documentation and testable APIs
• Communication – Tools like StatusPage make it easy for you to communicate system status with your customers
• Reporting – Consolidate project status into a tool like Geckoboard to eliminate digging through emails and different interfaces

And that list is just for development. Now think about all of your other business processes.

Just Remember

Every time you repeat a task that can be automated, you are losing not only that time today, but the compounded future value of that time. Stop. Get your calculator. Do the math. Pretty powerful, eh? Now multiply that by the number of developers on your team. Doh!

Remember the simple rule: If you do something  twice manually, immediately look to automate it.

Your Assignment

• Put a sticky note on your monitor that asks “What did we automate today?”
• Every time you meet with your dev team, ask “What are we doing manually that we can automate?”
• Immediately do the ROI calculation and, based on the value, prioritize the next set of automation into the roadmap