Process Automation

As any other field in software industry , automation is an art and not science, its has to be done in a creative way.
As I am not a Jargon man , lets talk about the process in simple terms.

• Process is a set of related activities
• Each Activity has associated actors and action
• Each Activity has atleast one actor and action
  
• Questions to be asked here are :
  
  
  Are the actors human or computer programs ?
  Are these actions programatic or manual ?
  Does the process once started requires manual intervention for any of its activity ?
  If yes how often within the scope of one process completion is manual intervention required ?
  
  Are there any reduandant reverse tasks in entire set of activity ?
  
  I would like to given an example here , in one of my projects we needed test data to perform ourautomated testing, we wanted that data in CSV format so that its easily readable by our test cases.But the data given to us by testing team was in DOC format which we used to convert to CSV format using few computer programs and little bit of manual intervention. OK , so whats the point here.Well, the point is the "testing team" received the same set (probably a little larger set) of data from DB Data set up team in CSV MS Excel format.Now you can see how much of effort was wasted in this conversion and reconversion. Some times, its necessary to transform the data in the format required by a particular team within the project. But the entire process has to be carefully envisaged to save cost and reduce manual intervention
  
  Is the process periodic ? I mean has to be done at a particular time. ?
  
  Does the process requires periodic intervention ?
  
  Can this be hooked up to mail ( smtp )/ Chat / SMS ?
  
  Answering all the above question will help you make a decsion on designing a process automation framework for your project.
  
  I shall be writing a follow up and giving an example on how it can be done.