Accelerate Your Development Process With Automation (Infragistics Podcast, Ep 5)

If you want to start automating your development processes but don’t know where to start, tune in to this latest episode of the Infragistics Podcast [ iTunes | Google Play | MP3 Download | RSS ]. In it, Ignite UI product manager James Bender talks with Kevin Grossnicklaus, president of ArchitectNow, about practices and principles of automation in development.

Kevin has extensive experience with automation, working with clients that range from small startups building automation into their processes from the start, all the way up to Fortune 500 companies with vast amounts of existing code and a complex mix of practices. He and James talk about the ways automation has changed over time and continues to change today, and about the various tools that Kevin and his teams prefer. Kevin also shares ideas on how to introduce automation to businesses that rely heavily on manual processes.

“The number one thing in selling it is just more education: Demonstrate how it’s successful somewhere else and how they can use it to make their team better,” Kevin says. “I’ve never run into a development team that doesn’t want to improve. It really is more out of fear, that they think the improvement is going to come at a huge cost or it’s going to make them slower.” 

For clients that are concerned about cost and time, or that don’t want to relive the pain of a past automation project that went poorly, Kevin recommends taking time to identify what’s reasonable and possible to do before pushing forward. Tune in to hear more about how automation can help developers save time and prevent errors, in part by drawing on the practices and scripts that are available to borrow and adapt.

“Developers tend to be lazy, so most of that stuff has been overcome by some lazy developer that just wants it to happen and doesn’t want to think about it,” Kevin jokes. “Somebody probably has a script that you can just grab and make work.”