Monthly Insights - Automation, Ambiguity and Agile

Automation Everything boring that can be automated, should probably be automated. Whether others know about that automation, depends upon how much it is valued over looking busy. Image by magnific I've been on a self undertaken journey at work for the past couple of months - the automation of our build process. I learnt a lot about how Jenkins works, how interactions happen between GitHub, Jenkins, Artifactory, Docker, Ansible, etc. I started slow - one build pipeline that creates and pushes Docker images, and I kept adding pipelines as I felt the need. Today, I have a suite of pipelines that run tests, code coverage, build, deploy, cleanup, and run security scans across x86 and s390x. Some highlights of this suite - A multi architecture build - UI built on an x86 agent and build folder sent over to an s390x agent. This agent then builds the backend and the final image An end-to-end .jar updater - Separate java repository whose .jar files were imported into the main repository to be called. The pipeline built these .jars and automatically created a PR on GitHub. This has freed up a lot of dev hours for my team and myself. It's also helped keep the systems (and me) sane with the insane amount of work that gets done nowadays. I keep looking for things I can automate now, especially the small, mundane tasks since the time saved really does compound up. To anyone reading this, or future me - "Automation is like getting regular exercise; you might not see immediate results, but your systems will thank you later." Ambiguity The biggest blocker of them all is often the difference in understanding of the same words Image by starline on Magnific A couple of years ago, when I just started working as a software engineer, I struggled with ambiguity. Before this, the requirements were straightforward assignments with most of them written down. Now, I hold the opinion that dealing with ambiguity and sifting through it is a large part of my job. There's multiple stakeholders, rang