Given the time, budget, resources constraints - is the automation approach giving me a reasonable advantage over:
- not doing any automation and using a different strategy to come to the same results;
- not doing anything at all and accepting the possibility, risk and impact of something going wrong;
- a different automation approach(different level, tools, angle, implementation);
You can just play this game in your head and with the PM/PO/Devs/Stakeholders, each time you automate something with higher cost/impact:
- Worst case scenarios of doing it - e.g. you take resources away from development or testing of other features that can bring or avoid losing money;
- Worst case scenarios on not doing it - e.g. A bug appears in prod, is found by other systems or people, an estimated impact cost of about 10k ; can the bug or similar bugs with higher impact appear very often? compared to the cost of 50k to automate something to have caught that bug sooner.
- Worst case scenario of automating in X way vs Y way;
- Worst case scenario of automating vs different strategy to arrive to a similar result;
In my last team we were doing these exercises often.
We don’t just implement automation because it could someday find something. We put it in a balance with the other factors, we briefly discuss it, sometimes takes 1 minute, sometimes could be hours…
And everyone in the team automates something for their benefit or supposedly for the product monitoring: it can be logging system optimizations/db/graphs, notifications by e-mail for errors, API schema checks, API data checkers, integration or unit checks, etc…
If the automation ‘thing’ was already implemented you have a few options:
- is it used or could be used? If not - delete it, archive it…it’s useless now…
- if it is still used - what’s the result that it brings: are they relevant?
- can it be better? how expensive it would be to modify it? what’s the worst case scenario for not doing anything?
- is anyone still working on it? re-evaluate and estimate the risk of not doing it; compare with the costs of doing it; decide if it needs to be canceled, stopped, direction change.