Automation Best Practices

Automation Best PracticesSeattleDataGuyBlockedUnblockFollowFollowingJan 20Automation isn’t always about automated cars and drones that will deliver our purchases to our doorsteps.

The goal of automation is to make people’s lives easier and not have them come in on work on Saturdays.

There is a lot of tasks in the workplace that still can be automated to avoid having late nights and long weekends stuck at work.

This doesn’t mean that automation in itself is easy to implement.

Developing automated systems is a discipline, it requires patience, robust design and clearly thinking through the process.

There are good practices that can be overlooked when implementing an automated systems that can create a lot of tech debt.

This will weigh down your system and possibly just waste the time for future developers who either have maintain or recreate the system.

In order to avoid this an automated system should have solid error tracking, QA and be easy to maintain.

Here are a few great tips for developing an automated system.

Error And Logging TrackingLogging and error tracking does not come across as exciting work.

Even developing basic tracking functionality can seem tedious.

However, it is a necessary step for developing an automated system.

Logging and error tracking can take place in several layers.

The simplest form is to track in raw files everything that occurs.

This has the least overhead because it doesn’t need to be stored in a specific data system.

This allows for low-level maintenance and future data parsing if required.

Creating standardized logs allows for large amounts of unstructured data to be stored outside of a database and with modern technology and data storage systems searching through these files is much faster.

Having higher level logs with less information stored in standard data warehouse allows for tracking of issues and unhealthy systems.

This can be used to detect issues such as slow load times, persistent bugs, etc.

Unlike unstructured data, storing high-level issues in a data warehouse allows for easy views into trends and allows future analysis.

Especially as more complex automated systems come to fruition, being able to track and analyze errors and trends in usage will be a game changer.

Whether this is for automated cars, e-commerce, and the world of IOT devices.

The only way to manage the sheer volume of transactions and communication protocols between the various systems will be with automation.

Error tracking and logging can’t be an afterthought in this automated systems.

Otherwise, we will never be able to manage the holes in the systems we create.

QAError logging is for issues that occur after release.

The hope is we squash as many bugs before they occur.

The problem is that automation leaves a lot of trust in the programmers and developers that set up the systems.

Even trying to think through all the possible ways automated systems can go wrong, there are always failures and making sure to develop a QA suite that sweeps through the data and logs to make sure whatever automated processes are occurring, are occurring correctly.

There are basic QA tests that just make sure systems are running and then there are more complex systems that can take more of a machine learning approach.

Looking for patterns and data profiles that could speak to process issues.

For instance, sometimes null values are normal but sometimes they occur because of a specific issue.

This could be because of an outage in a particular region, an update that works well on one OS and not another, and various other issues that might not be detected by standard integration and unit tests.

Thus, going more in depth and developing a QA system that can do basic tests just to ensure systems are functioning as well as test for more complex issues.

Again, this is somewhere we would agree in implementing a form of a machine learning/data science system that can profile data to detect non-specific issues.

Simple Vs.

 ComplexOne of the reasons for this comic above is the fact that automation, when poorly designed quickly, becomes a nightmare.

Anti-patterns, over customizability, and poor design in general makes code difficult to maintain.

This will take more time to manage instead of saving time.

Instead of dealing with a hands off system you are managing a tech debt-ridden monstrosity that sucks up developer time.

If anyone recalls the Rube Goldberg machines we developed in middle school or elementary school you will recall the fact that in order to do simple tasks you over complicated and designed some system.

This is a great example of some automated systems.

In some cases, the task you might have been attempting to automate could have been done simpler or the system you developed is just too complex.

Over-engineering can be a serious problem that makes it very difficult for future engineers to maintain.

Over-abstracting code, developing too many functions, too many plausible paths can make code unmaintainable and untestable.

This often won’t be apparent until the developer that wrote the code leaves and the other programmers need to pick up where they left off.

This means good design, that doesn’t try to be too smart and over-engineered.

Most professions suffer from this issue.

Chefs try to put too much on one dish or an architects try to put too many features into a building.

At the end of the day, the best Chefs, Architects and engineers understand that sometimes simple exceeds elegant.

This doesn’t mean that concepts like abstraction and object-oriented are bad.

It’s just that some developers place these concepts over the maintainable code.

There is always a balance.

Dependency ManagementAutomated systems and processes have a lot of moving parts.

This means at some point some components will need to occur in sequence and some will need to wait until multiple dependencies have completed in order to ensure the safety and health of the system.

As more and more automated systems get developed to interact with people, beyond just robot arms behind safety walls and yellow tape, their systems will have to have multiple dependencies to ensure that the tasks they are performing are both correct and safe.

No matter if the system is interacting with people or if it is operating in the confines of a computer, having simplistic dependency management that allows for the developers to easily draw the paths makes it much easier to ensure that the system won’t run when it shouldn’t.

Automation does make life simpler when it is developed purposefully and fully thought through.

This means planning how the error will be tracked and how the system will manage and alert larger problems.

Designing a robust and maintainable system is not easy.

However, when correctly implemented it can improve your team’s productivity and simplify your life.

If instead, your automation project goes a bit off the rails, then it might be time to reassess!.

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