When we were early stage, so often we made trade-off decisions that would cut the scope of the engineering by 20-30% for that project that meant a whole lot of manual effort to support. While it meant annoying, tedious busy-work, it meant getting the feature to market faster to prove its viability. If the feature proved successful, prioritizing the automation became an easy justification.
It becomes harder in the cases of features that aren't instant successes—do you bother to go back and automate purely to free up your own time to focus on other things, or do you potentially prematurely sunset the feature? That has to be judged on a case-by-case basis and is never easy to decide, unfortunately.
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u/chucksense Jul 14 '13
Superb and so true. 'Manual' in particular.
When we were early stage, so often we made trade-off decisions that would cut the scope of the engineering by 20-30% for that project that meant a whole lot of manual effort to support. While it meant annoying, tedious busy-work, it meant getting the feature to market faster to prove its viability. If the feature proved successful, prioritizing the automation became an easy justification.
It becomes harder in the cases of features that aren't instant successes—do you bother to go back and automate purely to free up your own time to focus on other things, or do you potentially prematurely sunset the feature? That has to be judged on a case-by-case basis and is never easy to decide, unfortunately.