Automated Testing Institute

Lesson 1: Automate Your Data Management Tasks – the first frontier...

It all started many years ago when I was working for NASA as a contractor.  I was designing and developing hardware for testing flight systems at a time before widespread usage of desktop PC’s and before Windows.  I was tasked with handling the financial data on my job and just found it to be horribly boring and repetitive.  Spreadsheet programs were only beginning to gain popularity and I had one called Procalc 3D.  Procalc 3D was a very nice and cheap spread sheet program that allowed calculations between sheets and not just between cells (hence the “3D”).  It did not take long for me to  figure out how to make the financial management part of my job easier and less time intensive.  In a matter of days I had the whole thing worked out where I could simply input the week’s financial data into a spreadsheet and then press a key to get a complete set of graphs and the required paperwork for the bean counters down the hall.  The whole thing was automated to the point that I could almost completely replace the financial guys down the hall as I replicated most of the paperwork they were producing to conform to NASA contracting requirements.  The only parts missing were the formal report and some of the proprietary data that I was not privy to.  Boy, did that experience turn the light on for me!  Now we have the MS Office suite, OpenOffice and others that integrate the basic tools of the trade (spreadsheet, documents, database and email) with a simple programming language in the background. Click to read the rest