Rather than having a username and password in plain text you might want to put the password into a file in an unreadable format. This has some pretty clear benefit that you are not fully exposing the password. From time to time of course you want to test with a password in plain text but in production that practice should be avoided if possible. Clearly if someone “bad” acquires the file they could essentially have the password username (if they got this from your automation script) combination. A sysadmin could minimize that threat by limiting who has access to the servers and use file permissions to protect the password text file.
