Concerned about your team’s performance? Looking for ways to enhance your team’s productivity and getting rid of all those mundane tasks? Years of consulting and building products have thought me that Automation is the key to improving team’s productivity and bringing joy back to software development.
If your team is seriously looking at automating as much as possible on their projects, you must consider some items like:
- Setting up an automated build for your project. You must explore tools like Ant, NAnt, Maven, GAnt, Rake, etc
- Creating automated unit, acceptance and UI tests for your project. Have a look at xUnit frameworks, FitNesse, Selenium, Watir, Abbot, etc
- Setting up a Continuous Integration (CI) process for your team. Configuring a CI server with Version Control System for your project
- Setting up developer work-stations with all the necessary tools and framework to be able to independently build the project from developer desk in a predictable and repeatable way
- Setting up an evolutionary database design and data migration process using tools like Migrations, Liquibase, etc
- Enabling the automated build to switch between Development, CI, Staging and Live environment using simple properties
- Setting up coding standards for the team and using tools like CheckStyle and other Static analysis tools to automatically validate code format and other aspects with each build
- Adding code coverage or test coverage frameworks like Cobertura, Jester, etc to your build
- Setting up an integrated project dashboard on CI server with various project metrics like BurnUp/BurnDown chart, test coverage trends, test counts, etc. This Dashboard is visible to everyone on the team and all the stakeholders
- Setting up a build promotion process
- Setting up a team wiki which is versioned along with the whole project
The general rule of thumb I use when is comes to automation is:
If you need to do something more than once a day, it got to be automated. Period!
