Applied Software Project Management

Use Automation

There are many tasks over the course of a software project that can be automated. Unit tests are a good example of automation —before programmers started using automated unit tests, they had to manually verify each function and user interface element before delivering a build. By automating unit tests, the programmers were able to make them much less time-consuming tasks and, as a result, many more programmers take the time to build unit tests.

But unit tests are not the only manual programming task that can be automated. Automation can ensure that the software is built the same way each time, that the team sees every change made to the software, and that the software is tested and reviewed in the same way every day so that no defects slip through or are introduced through human error.

When projects become complex and require many steps to build, it's easy for programmers to forget a step. A programmer may build a version of the software that is missing a library, or is compiled with incorrect options. What's more, some programming teams have discovered that, as their build process becomes more and more complex, they have to dedicate more of a senior team member's time to generating new builds on a regular basis, which can cause delays in the project. Eventually, it becomes difficult for the team to even generate a reproducible build. When the build is delivered to users, there are often defects that can be traced back to missing libraries, or to required files that ...