5 ways to write maintainable automation code

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2021-06-21 18:00:08

One of the oldest challenges in software creation is how best to balance ease of development against writing maintainable code. Organizations struggle to achieve an equilibrium, and both goals often end up being compromised.

Automation tools can help teams strike the right balance — but only when development teams use them correctly. When developers don’t, these tools can make things worse.

Establish best practices for tool selection across all dev teams. The first rule in tidy automation code is the most important, and the hardest. The best approach is to gather a lead developer from each team and ask them to lay out the rules. These rules should be based on their experiences with the areas where automation is most likely to be of value and the ways that standardizing the way code automation is done would benefit both current coding and later maintenance.

Also, this is a good opportunity to look at static code analysis and code review strategies and tools. Many users like to run a de-lint tool to check for basic problems even before code review. However, the value of de-linting will depend on the programming language. Interpretive languages such as Python or JavaScript benefit from more casual de-linting, where full static code analysis is more useful for compiled languages.

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