Running an automated trading system

Some time ago I tried to get into automated trading systems. I have choose custom software trading platform that I'm co-developing with my friends that like system investing too (and helped me to quickly get into subject - so thanks a lot). It's rather my hobby than real source of income, but who knows.

My target was easy system, trading on index futures. It should be suitable for individual investor, that spends no more time than couple minutes a day on-line "looking at" the market.
After lots of tests (I really mean it) and choosing one candidate model I started using it at real account in "production" mode. Decisions are made by system, then manually validated and executed. The software was tested a lot, so no surprises from that side. Besides of that I still need to manually validate correctness of input data.

It's hard to get good free data source. I have heard that many commercial services that provide stock market data, have glitches in their data too. It's hard to find something usable for low scale individual investing - that kind of services are more oriented towards bigger businesses or "investing houses".

I'm still learning so I'm going to make next trading system after I catch some problems with the first one. My next target is more sophisticated system including machine learning methods, and maybe better procedures for choosing good candidate systems during backtesting.