Autonomy Ladder

A framework for describing levels of automation in software development, adapted from the levels of autonomy used in autonomous vehicle design. At the lowest level, all work is done manually by a person. At each higher level, more decision-making and execution is handed to tooling or agents, with the highest level representing fully autonomous operation requiring no human intervention. The framework is used to help teams understand where they currently sit, where they want to get to, and how to move between levels safely. In a testing context, the ladder might run from manual test creation, through low-code automation, through AI-assisted test generation, up to a fully agentic testing system that explores, writes, executes, and reports without human instruction.