Some background:
I am new at a company. I was hired because I am an extremely strong software tester with great development skills. The company I was hired on at wants to see a lot of changes and quite frankly, they need a LOT of changes to be done in their QA department. It is overall great right now but I do see a lot of areas where they can easily be more efficient is all.
I am looking into developing several different utilities, one being a QA dashboard for data collection and one being an automation suite. I feel the both of these go hand in hand in order to make data collection for the automation suite a bit smoother and easier. Not to mention the benefits it will give to the manual testing efforts as well.
The company uses agile methodology which leaves me quite busy testing changes most of the time. I have a basic automation framework set up that I am about to start refining and switch from Java (My preferred language) to C# (The company's preferred language). Prior to doing so I am wanting to sit down and discuss the ideas I have as far as how I think things will operate best and to get feedback to hopefully improve the product.
The Question:
Is there any advice for setting up a basic, simple suite that will demonstrate the power of what automation combined with a datasink/customized database can offer versus just a basic automation suite?
Thanks!