Setting target goals

Very often, the cause of unsuccessful projects is unclear requirements, leading to unrealistic target goals. With automation, the end user (and their experience) should always be the top priority when designing a project. Automation that is developed without achievable target goals is likely to be abandoned and turned into shelfware. To mitigate this abandonment, we must understand the end user's objectives for the automation, and then set realistic target goals for success.

Setting realistic target goals early in the development process is a large preventer of abandoned automation. Too often, automation deployed into production is abandoned by end users because it doesn't perform to expectations, or doesn't fully meet the end user's requirements or objectives (Figure 5.3):

Figure 5.3 – Causes of automation abandonment

Prior to starting development, align with the end users on a set of success criteria for...