Principles of Automation

Automation is an increasingly interesting topic in pretty much every technology discipline these days. There’s lots of talk about tooling, practices, skill set evolution, and more - but little conversation about fundamentals. What little is published by those actually practicing automation, usually takes the form of source code or technical whitepapers. While these are obviously valuable, they don’t usually cover some of the fundamental basics that could prove useful to the reader who wishes to perform similar things in their own organization, but may have different technical requirements.