Cognos jobs are fragile

While working with cognos jobs to automate testing I found that jobs are sometimes not very well suited to do this.

The issue is that it's very easy to break them while working on the reports.

Certain types of updates to the report invalidates the job, e.g. if you rename a report or even if you use copy-paste through the clipboard.

Another problem is if there are any changes to the prompt pages or the parameter values. Since these are stored in the job it won't be able to fill out the prompt pages properly when it's trying to run the reports.

Conclusion

Since I don't know any better I still think it's a good idea to use jobs to automate unit and smoke testing. It's just that we have to keep an eye on them to make sure they're not broken.