Stacking The Automation Deck - Paul Grizzafi

Description:

Arranging the playing cards in a deck to be in one’s favor is called stacking the deck. Outside of card playing, we use the term more generally to mean arranging a situation to increase our chances of a favorable outcome. When it comes to automation endeavors, the meaning is no different. Specifically, we want to arrange our architecture, implementation, and usage patterns to be appropriate for our endeavor’s desired life-span.

One approach to future-proofing is to focus less on the automation framework and more on the automation stack. An automation stack is a layered automation architecture where each layer builds upon the previous one and provides an audience-appropriate interface to the lower levels’ capabilities. This layered approach helps extend an implementation’s longevity by increasing the portability of the implementation across frameworks and across tools.