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Home > Devops Mastery > Devops Mastery - Episode 09 - Don't start automating it until it's documented.
Podcast: Devops Mastery
Episode:

Devops Mastery - Episode 09 - Don't start automating it until it's documented.
Category: Technology
Duration:
Publish Date: 2014-04-23 19:00:00
Description: Before you can script a thing you have to understand the steps to complete the task. You should also have some level of consensus with your team about the tasks that need to be undertaken to complete it. Ultimately the process should be documented to a point where you can hand the document to novice and they can make it work. However, documenting to this level is often not cost or time effective. That doesn't mean it's not a great goal. You need to be pragmatic and document enough to fully understand what needs to be done. Documenting your processes helps verify that you know everything that must be automated. The document is the automation just in a different language. Having someone review your documentation and execute it in a virtual environment is really your first level of functional testing. A second set of eyes will often finds little things you do so automatically you don't need to think about them. This can be a serious issue if that thing you do as a reflex manually is skipped in the automated form. If you don't do step b, and slip straight to step c you can get what looks like a successful run but really just failed silently. Once you are done it also helps you to answer questions like: Should we be taking advantage of any silent installers? Could we do this with a simple shell script or do we need something with more power? How many steps are there? Can anyone write this or does it need to be a specialist?
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