Teach the computer how to execute your human-readable manual scripts.
If you have ever found yourself following a list of instructions and thinking to yourself "No human should be doing this," then How2 is for you!
How2 is just a concept right now. No code actually exists! This idea has been rolling around in my head for a while now, but I want to get the usage and documentation out there for comments before strking ground on the development.
Much like Cucumber does for behavior testing, How2 aims to do for the rest of the "manual scripts" out there in the world.
How2 takes a human readable, non-technical list of instructions and maps them to code snippets that perform the intended action. Beyond that, it wraps the execution of the instructions into a session that is both interactive and logged.
How2 also allows you to take on automation of your list of instructions piecemeal, by allowing unmapped steps to fallback to manual execution.
I have tried a number of times to get a really solid web application deployment setup. I've tried all sorts of solutions, from manual to packaged to roll-my-own. From these experiences, I have learned two truths:
- Human-readable instructions are great for cross-team communication and involvement of people of various technical backgrounds.
- Human-executed instructions are horrible for reproducible, stable, logged and painless deployments.
How2 is my attempt at resolving these two truths.
Learn more about How2 from the User's Perspective.
Learn more about How2 from the Developer's Perspective.