Automation Rate

People often talk about automation ignoring one factor, the automation rate. Maybe this is because it is too complex to explain.

Take a car for example. A car is called an 'automobile', but is it really 'auto' nowadays? No. There are a lot of 'peripheral' manual operations around the 'auto' piece.

• The driver of the car needs to spend a lot of manual effort to get a license.
• Before driving, the driver needs to manually get familiar with the route.
• During driving, a lot of maneuvers are required.
• Maintaining a car includes a lot of manual operations.

The 'auto' piece can only happen when so many manual operations are done.

Self-driving car is supposed to greatly increase the automation rate of people moving by car. But there is still room for increasing automation rate, like the car being able to understand human voice instructions, self-charge, self-maintain, etc. Ultimately, the only thing that a human needs to do is to tell the car 'please take me to ...'.

The ultimate goal of automation should be 100% rate. In the space of test automation, it looks like this can't be achieved without AI. Just imagine, a robot assistant comes in to do all testing work. The only thing you need to do is to tell the robot like 'please test all the APIs in this enterprise'.