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The Software World
The Hidden Cost of Software Automation
The pitfalls of automation to avoid. A lesson from the past
“Anything that you do more than twice has to be automated.” That sounds like a great quote. But, be careful. Automation is costlier than just the process of automating it.
This is speaking from a real case I’m sharing below.
A Real Case Story
There was a piece of code in our early days of mobile development that was relatively repetitive. It’s creating an SQL table and a set of functions such as insert, update, delete, etc., and connecting to a data model for the table.
Every time a table is created, one must go through creating and duplicating the table contents and their SQL commands function.
Repetitive process identified
As we’re starting development, more requests are coming in for new data to be stored, and hence likely to have more new tables and SQL to program.
This is so daunting.
Automating it — is not as hard as we think
So, instead of manually copying and modifying it, we create a script that, with minimal inputs, we generate all the boilerplate codes. It works well and is incorporated into our CI process too.
Instead of duplicating code, we now have some fixed data to provide to the Automation script, which will generate all the needed code in Java for our mobile app to use.
Oh, we need some modifications
After creating about four to five data tables, the need to create more tables ceased as more functionality focused on enhancing the app's functionality instead of inserting more data into it.
