The Automation Mantra

I love tools. I love writing them, I love learning how to make the computer do more work for me. But it's easy to get caught up in the excitement of development and lose sight of what automation's really about. That's why I've adapted a mission statement that an old boss of mine had. Whenever I find myself writing a new app, or looking for a place to apply something I've created, I take a step back and say to myself -

"My job is to provide the QA team with helpful, easy to use tools. The output of these tools should be simple to understand and share."

If what I'm doing doesn't meet the above criteria, then I know I'm doing something wrong. It's a simple sanity check, but it keeps me from building things that aren't worthwhile. There are a lot of people out there who have been soured on automation because their experiences were with tools that did not follow these guidelines.

So when you're building tools for others, make sure they are:
Helpful - don't build a solution in search of a problem. Make sure you're really filling a need.
Easy to Use - don't make it harder to use the tool than to run the test without it.
Easy to Understand Output - put human readable English in your output messages, and store those messages in a file format that's easy to read. I've found XML/HTML are usually the best bets; PDF isn't bad either.

What other guidelines do you follow with your automation mantra?