Do things that don’t scale
If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate the bottlenecks. – Paul Graham
With the title of Automation Engineer it might seem like automating bottlenecks is “my jam” and therefore “do[ing] things that don’t scale” might seem kind of an odd thing for me to agree with. However it turns out this is a useful way to think through solutions to problems, including testing problems.
From a business standpoint this makes a lot of sense, why waste time automating something until you are sure it has value? Many startups have blown through money building solutions to things (or automating problems) that aren’t actually important (or real problems). If you are an established company and thinking of branching into a new market segment, it’s ok to do everything by hand at first: signing up customers, placing orders, building website, etc.
From a software standpoint this also makes a lot of sense. Don’t worry about automating bottlenecks like test setup or execution until:
- You are sure the tests have value (business or technical) AND
- They’ve become bottlenecks to delivery
Otherwise don’t waste your time.