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Geoff Stevens for Software.com

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Is hyperautomation the future of development?

I recently read about Gartner's 12 technology trends for 2022. One of the predictions that stood out to me was the idea of hyperautomation:

The hyperautomation playbook yields benefits for enterprise leaders in the year ahead. This strategy seeks to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many processes as possible.

In the world of software development, there's a lot of discussion about automation. Automated workflows impact so many different parts of the software development life cycle — CI/CD pipelines, testing, code suggestions, code scaffolding, and even writing documentation.

What do you think? Will hyperautomation will be a key trend in software development in 2022? What things can or can't be automated?

Top comments (6)

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ziker22 profile image
Zikitel22 • Edited

Dont get me wrong im advocate of automation. But lets be reasonable here if you are outside FAANG (resources) you dont have to automate 100% of things . Quick example.

I worked on project that included among other things native mobile apps. It was automated lets say 95% and only thing which remained manual was going to some repository (imagine S3) downloading ios and android binary and then uploading them to transporter/google play. It took 2 minutes at worst. We did it every release so once per week
Automating this would take one day if you know what you are doing. Do the math :).

TL;DR - Automation yes. Hyperautomation mostly no

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CincyBC

It's always a cost-benefit analysis. Anyone automating without considering that isn't in business :)

I just want to say that to me it's not necessarily always just a time cost. We had a task at my company where another company would manually upload a list to a secured server and someone (non-developer) would take that file and copy and paste the contents into a web app and hit submit. The amount of time it takes to do all of that is around 5 minutes...but the task is all week days for 3 months. We're talking 5 hours of time total over the 3 months but probably an 8 hour day to automate it. On a time-cost basis, it makes sense to use a lower paid employee to do the data entry work than a higher paid developer for more time, but "everyday" also means you have to contingency plan for illnesses and vacations during that 3 month stretch. Now you have a manager balancing resources for this 5 minute task and potentially pulling in one or two other people and training them on it. I voted to automate and monitor, but was rejected because they saw 5 vs 8 hours...

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thegeoffstevens profile image
Geoff Stevens

Definitely. And in addition to the upfront costs, I think there's also a long-term cost to maintaining these in-house automations that should be factored in. What works today might break tomorrow, and someone will need to fix it.

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Martin Pham

Btw, now they should be called MAANG

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Usama Hashmi

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Jon Mahat

Automating this would take one day if you know what you are doing. Do the math.

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