As a Software Engineering Manager, another one of the core principles I strive to instill in my teams is the importance of automation to improve organizational efficiency. Why? Because time is valuable, and if there is an opportunity to replace manual work with automated processes is not just a luxury but a necessity. This principle is something we apply across the board—in our team processes, the software we develop, and the testing we conduct to ensure quality.
Embracing Automation in Team Processes
In our day-to-day operations, finding opportunities to automate repetitive tasks is a continuous pursuit. Whether it's automating the setup of development environments, streamlining code reviews, or simplifying project management workflows, we aim to minimize manual interventions. This not only saves time but also reduces the potential for human error. By investing in automation tools and scripts, we free up our team members to focus on more complex, value-adding activities, like solving the problems, not working on the systems.
One concrete example is our approach to code integration. We’ve automated our build processes, enabling continuous integration (CI). Every code change triggers a series of automated tests and builds, ensuring that any issues are caught early and resolved quickly.
Automating Software Development
When it comes to the software we create, automation is a fundamental component. We constantly look for ways to embed automated processes within the applications we develop. This could involve automating data collection and analysis, integrating automated notification systems, or developing features that allow our users to automate their workflows. I also encourage the use of plugins and tools that can help automate software development. We utilize GitHub Copilot for our engineers which often helps with a lot of the boilerplate code that has to be created. We look for plugins for VS Code that make development in React for the front end projects easier. We use code scanning and analysis tools that provide real time feedback to engineers to improve the quality of their code even before we open a PR.
Prioritizing Automated Testing
Quality assurance is another area where automation has a huge impact and is part of our strategic goals to continue to apply this principle of automating to improve organizational efficiency. We prioritize automated testing to ensure that our software meets the highest standards of quality without sacrificing speed. By implementing a robust automated testing framework, we can run extensive test suites quickly and consistently with every code change.
This approach allows us to identify and fix bugs early in the development cycle, reducing the cost and effort associated with post-release fixes. Automated tests, including unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests, provide us with the confidence to deploy new features and updates rapidly. This commitment to automation in testing not only enhances product quality but also accelerates our delivery timelines.
Automating Deployments
Automated deployments are another crucial aspect of our strategy to improve efficiency. We leverage continuous deployment (CD) practices to automate the release process, ensuring that new code is deployed to production swiftly and safely. By automating deployment pipelines, we eliminate manual steps, reduce deployment errors, and enable more frequent releases. Working with our Platform Engineering team has created a process that streamlines the build, testing, and deployment to production. This has significantly improved our development speed and reliability, allowing us to deliver high-quality software faster. The result is that in my current job, we push to production several times each day, with a typical average of about 13 times per week. We could not do this without automation!
This has been a game-changer for our team, allowing us to respond to emergent issues, requests from customer and product feedback with agility. Automated deployments also mean that our developers spend less time on operational tasks and more time on innovation and problem-solving.
An Automation Mindset
I find that it is important to encourage an 'automation mindset' in the engineering teams. Often individuals and teams can get into the habit of doing some process, some operation on a repeated basis and may not think about whether or not it could be optimized and automated. So asking on a regular basis 'what do you do that could be done with automation' can be a entry point into discovering something that might be a source of friction because it is manual that could be improved with an automation. Encouraging the team to think about how they could work more effectively if some of the processes that they are responsible for could be more or completely automated is helpful.
Conclusion
The pursuit of automation is integral to our efforts to enhance organizational efficiency. By continuously seeking opportunities to automate tasks and processes, we create a more productive, error-resistant, and agile development environment. As a Software Engineering Manager, my goal is to empower my teams to embrace automation, not just as a tool, but as a mindset that drives continuous improvement and innovation.
If there is an opportunity to be more efficient with automation, we prioritize that in our work. The benefits are clear: increased productivity, higher quality, faster delivery, and a more motivated and engaged team. Automation is not just about doing things faster; it’s about doing things better.