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It's not that it is unproductive (for me), but rather that it feels like drudge work. Which makes me less motivated to do it, which negatively influences my productivity on other parts of the project. I think we can add documentation to this as well.

Old school people might call it getting stuck in a rut. It's much easier for me to get stuck in a rut doing testing and documentation, compared to doing something new and exciting.

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Fair enough, but classifying something as "unproductive" just because you don't enjoy doing it seems a bit... incorrect.

I'm curious as to whether developing automated testing and deployment stuff would count as doing testing and deploying, or as developing exciting new stuff.

Sorry, just to clarify a bit: it's not that I consider it unproductive because I don't like it, but because my personal productivity is much less for projects I am less engaged in. So I'm less productive due to the nature of the work.

And for me, developing the automated stuff is still not particularly interesting. I guess if I were designing cars, my interests (and thus most productive department) would lie with building the car itself (engine, body, drivetrain, etc.) rather than the safety system or QA. Maybe it's just my personality.

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