Nowadays, automation can be found everywhere, from retail to manufacturing and production. It’s at an inflection point, with the next era of use cases being those that eliminate the need for 99% of human interaction. This situation may cause many people to wonder, will automation replace programmers?
You shouldn’t see the emergence of automation in technology negatively, as automation will not kill jobs. Instead, automation poses a new set of opportunities and challenges for work and workers, making their jobs easier and more productive in the long run. Automated tooling is part of a programmer’s toolkit rather than a replacement for human programmers. Promising, nonetheless, but it takes a different perspective to precisely see how automation complements programming jobs.
How is automation helping developers?
Work faster
With automated tooling handling repetitive and straightforward tasks, software developers have more time to focus on solving higher-value problems. A post by CodeGrip details precisely the automation steps and tools that help achieve higher productivity. Automation improves and streamlines processes, allowing software developers to deliver code faster and leaves room to build solutions to your customers problems and fulfill their needs and wants. Code automation tools like Modularis Architect, which is part of PlatformPlus, give your development team the structure to build robust, secure, flexible, and elastic platforms. These tools can help your development team automate a significant amount of coding (up to 70% of your total solution) without losing the customizability and performance that might occur with black box automation tools, such as low- or no-code development platforms.
More comprehensive and rigorous testing
Most organizations focus on solving the effects of sub-par quality code and not the root cause. In other words, the solution to software quality problems is primarily hiring QA engineers. This approach seems to have a psychological effect on software developers when they know somebody’s job is finding their bugs. This knowledge creates an interesting situation when deadlines are tight and the priority for the developer switches to building the most code in the least amount of time; the quality of the code invariably decreases.
It Is less expensive and more effective to tackle the quality problem at the source: Building quality into writing the code. The value of unit testing goes underappreciated time and time again. Many software development leaders and engineers consider unit testing a waste of time: why write more code to test my code? Yes, It requires more work to write unit tests, two to three times more work. However, It is not a waste of time or resources.
The practice of writing code to test your code helps the developer think through and exercise the most common usage scenarios. You’ll find 80% of the bugs by covering 20% of the possible scenarios your code will face in a production environment. Therefore, the quality of the code sent to the QA engineer is in much better shape; hence, reducing testing time.
However, the primary benefit of unit testing is that you can automate it to run every time your code changes to make sure the existing code is running correctly and nothing broke.
Here are some of the specific ways automation aids the quality assurance process:
- Saving time during testing: Automation in software testing decreases the amount of time spent manually testing. Teams can then devote their efforts to more complicated activities that need human interpretation.
- Improved Regression Testing: With faster deployment comes an increasing requirement for regression testing, to the point where human programmers can no longer keep up. Companies may utilize automation to automate some of the most time-consuming regression testing activities and use machine learning to develop test scripts.
- Testing Consistency: Automation is advantageous over human programmers in keeping the testing process consistent. Although QA engineers are skilled at finding and addressing complex problems, some errors can occur due to the QA engineer burning out from completing tedious processing. Automation, however, can keep testing without burning out and test far beyond what a human can in a short time.
Better integration and delivery
Generally, developers must go through a lengthy and awkward process of merging and deploying code to production, mostly done manually. However, automation solves this problem with Continuous Integration and Development (CI/CD) solutions. CI/CD allows for much more efficient production code deployment by automating many of the repeatable tasks. This automation not only simplifies development and deployment but also generates more resilient applications.
Conclusion
In essence, automation will help your development team build more value for your customers at a higher quality. Your software development costs and delivery times become predictable and easier to manage. You have fewer bugs to worry about, significantly reducing your operation and maintenance costs. The motivation of your development team will be higher; who doesn’t like the thrill of hitting deadlines without burning out? And you’ll have happier customers! A win-win scenario all around!
How PlatformPlus can help?
At Modularis, we believe there is a better way to build software. Automation will not kill jobs; instead, it would help nurture innovation, bridging the gap in almost every R&D organization where the majority of time is spent on maintenance when it could be better spent on innovation. PlatformPlus automates complicated R&D processes to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your team. And it’s backed by a skilled engineering team that provides the technical guidance and coaching you need to get to market faster than you ever imagined.
Learn more about PlatformPlus
The beauty of PlatformPlus is that it is both a product and a service. As a service, it connects you with a team of experts who can guide the leadership area of your organization. As a product, it gives you full access to Modularis technology, including all libraries and tools necessary to de-risk and accelerate software development. PlatformPlus allows your team to build new features or products with significantly less effort allowing them to deliver on time and budget while spending the bulk of their time on innovation rather than maintenance. Thanks to our battle-tested architecture and automation technology, the products or features that your team would put out would have 90% fewer defects than before.
Still hesitant about PlatformPlus? Try it risk-free! Don’t pay us if you don’t see results.