Automation

What's been happening
Has been quite a while since i last posted anything as i've been busy learning new stuff, which includes new programming languages like C#, VB, Ruby and also building automation into a product that specializes in 3D modeling and visualization.

Laying down my perceived flaws
Before we come to exploring Automation per say, one of the challenges i had to face was to actually learn the tools i needed to hit the ground running. Wasn't exactly tough but it required me to put down my previous reservations about learning and using the Microsoft Technology suite "stack" if i can call it that. Once that was done, it was kind of cool and i believe people whom have extensive coding background in open source technologies would make the leap of faith to Microsoft easier than the other way round. That's what i saw at least.

The key thing that helped me cross that barrier was recognizing that i should looking at other technologies with an objective mind; focus on the problem and not the technology.

Automation
Having said that, next thing i want to talk about is Automation. After spending time working on it, i'm happy to say that we've shipped version 1.5 to our customers with the company. Now we're waiting for feedback. Yep, feedback's important to the whole process - no point building something that people don't like to use. Building automation is kind of a tough subject to begin with since it doesn't really fall into the standard SDLC; but that's what they said about Test Driven Development. TDD should be part of the SDLC period

The usual questions are "How does automation help me?", "How much would it cost to build this automation?", "What should we automate?", "Can this be automated?". There are many more. The typical use cases of automation seem to lie more in complementing QA i.e Automated Testing.

We've built the usual stuff that comes along with Automated Testing Frameworks using C#, VB - Test Management Tools, Test Execution Tools (local, distributed), Test Reporting/Archival/Trending Tools...what did i miss? Hmm...whatever

But i see a problem. We have to get someone whose skilled in the Microsoft Technology stack to be able to write tests (Well, there are a lot of Microsoft professionals aren't there?...yeah sure...but what if you can garner the people whom practice Python, Ruby, Scala and wouldn't that open you to a greater pool of talents?). Those professionals may/may not need to re-write libraries not found in the C# arsenal etc

Where is this leading to?
Think IronPython, IronRuby. These two ports originated from Python and Ruby respectively and they both have a great number of followers but most important of all, the integration of Microsoft suite with open source is a very powerful notion. I've been working on a DLR integration with the Automation framework lately and progress has been promising. This is exciting because of a number of reasons: I can still program in Python/Ruby, i can still re-use libraries that was previously developed (re-invention of the wheel aint gonna happen), integration with Rails/Django to pull/publish data, you get the idea? The possibilities are endless.