Now, when I extract the essence of all the benefits, the bigger picture that I get is RPA helps to increase Test Automation Coverage, reduces the time required, hence reducing in the process the cost of Testing and in turn increasing the Company’s profit.

2. RPA has taken the IT world by storm. I won’t say that it is the
newest thing in business because it has been there around for
about 10 years now. But now is the time when it is spreading like
wildfire. More and more companies want to adopt it.
To set the context, let’s look at how AI has broken all the barriers
of our imagination. I bet that a few years ago when we used to
see robots in movies, we would think that they are just part of our
imagination or even if we considered them to become reality
someday, we always thought that the day to be many years
away. But what we never imagined was that technology will
progress so much so soon. Today Artificial intelligence is making
machines more and more human-like. They want machines to
not only follow our instructions but to think, and possibly also to
exhibit emotions. It is almost like humans want to assemble
humans in labs. No wonder then that a robot named Sophia was
very recently even given citizenship of Saudi Arabia.

3. Now going back to Robotic Process Automation. Going just by
the words, it seems like Robots automating processes. The
catch, however, is that that when we say Robot, we don’t mean
an actual physical robot, but a virtual one — the automation
program.
What’s the big deal about RPA in software test automation?
Many could argue that in traditional Automation also we were
creating automation programs. So what is all the hype about?
The key distinctions according to me are :
It is script less: Coming from a Manual testing background it
was always a challenge for me to always keep learning the latest
scripting languages but now I don’t need to learn any
programming language to automate a test scenario. You just
need to be good with your logics and should be able to think out
of the box scenarios.

4. Focus is back to product quality: I am not saying that in
Traditional automation the product quality was getting hampered,
But in my own experience I feel that when I was working on
Automation via scripts, most of my time was getting consumed in
writing code and at the end of the day, only very few scenarios
were automated, and I was not able to cover as much scenario
and I didn’t have the time to dive into variety of scenario. So I
feel that out of two 1 thing was always getting compromised
either the Coverage or the deadline. But with RPA tool this
problem of mine has been resolved to a great extent.
How things work when automating test cases with RPA?
There are many RPA tools available in the market like UI Path,
Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism and many more. You can use
any (FYI: I am not promoting any specific tool).

5. There are few basic criteria on which all the RPA tools are based
on:
Already defined user actions: Most of the user actions that one
can think of while automating a test case like the click of a
button, mouse hover, opening browser, typing into a text box and
many more, they are already defined and the user doesn’t have
to code.
Built-in decision logics and looping statements: The best part
about using RPA tool for creating scripts was, I didn’t have to
worry about the syntax of my decision logic and adding loops, for
example, do-while, for, etc. They are built-in and I just needed to
use them.
Configuring of user events through Parameters: Every user
action or event that we use can be easily configured using its
parameters. Almost every property of a user event is made
available so as it can be customized as much and as easily as
possible.
Easy to create variables: RPA tools make it very easy to create
a variable without stressing upon the syntax.

6. Error handling: If there is an error that occurs while configuring
the user events or in the full flow, RPA tools have very good error
handling mechanism. It helps the user to narrow down the area
of error and also gives very clear and specific error messages
making it very convenient for the user to correct the error.
What RPA has changed in my Automation Testing
approach?
So as I said above, for me RPA has put the focus back to
thinking about logic, covering some out of the box test
scenarios, rather than spending hours just automating the basic
functionality.
RPA has improved my testing coverage also, as I am able to
cover number and different types of scenarios.
Thanks to RPA, I am able to automate the test scenarios
faster as I don’t have to write every single line of code on my
own.

7. Another advantage of using an RPA tool is, I face less number
of errors while automating a test case. As in RPA tool, they have
built-in codes for most of the logics and I just have to make sure
that I use them in correct flow.
With RPA tool, I was able to manage my scripts much easily
as most of the times it just making tweaking into the properties of
the built-in user actions.
Also when I create my scripts using RPA tool, they are more
easily readable and I am able to explain them to another
person in a better way
Being from a manual testing background, it was always a big
challenge for me to always keep on learning the latest scripting
languages but now I don’t have to invest my time learning the
coding languages.
I can invest my mind in more decision making tasks rather
than some boring and repetitive tasks that can be done by
machines also.

8. Now, when I extract the essence of all the benefits, the bigger
picture that I get is RPA helps to increase Test Automation
Coverage, reduces the time required, hence reducing in the
process the cost of Testing and in turn increasing the Company’s
profit.
Having said that, I did face challenges while automating test
scripts with RPA Tool?
1) I was not able to automate everything
Having worked with different scripting automation tools, I feel that
there are some scenarios which I can’t achieve using RPA tools
like I am not able to automate scenario which deals with complex
Database entries, multiple formats of input or unstructured input
data.
2) It executes at a slower pace
When I execute a script created via any RPA tool it executes at a
UI speed but when I run a script created using scripting
languages, it is much faster. So I feel that RPA is comparatively
slower than the processes automated using traditional
automation.

9. 3) Not much available on Web, so need to explore yourself
Test Automation using RPA is relatively new. So there are many
built-in user actions and functionalities of different tools that you
have to explore on your own and not much help is available on
the web. So that was also one of the challenges that I faced.
4) It can increase a company’s Test Automation cost
When I started automation using RPA, most of the RPA tools that
I came across were paid and just 1 or 2 had free versions
available and that too had not much-advanced features contrary
to the open-source scripting tools available in the market. So I
feel that this can also prove to be a disadvantage as it will
increase the cost of Automation for a company.
But I feel that the pros somewhere outnumber the cons and the
proof of this is that more and more companies are investing in
Test Automation using RPA. So in my opinion, if you are the one
who wants to adopt RPA in Test Automation, then the time to act
is now.

10. Like other businesses, if you too are looking to develop RPA
solutions, Mindfire Solutions can be your partner of choice. We
have a team of highly skilled and certified software professionals,
who have developed many custom solutions for our global
clients over the years.
Here are a few interesting projects we have done. Click here to
know more:
Automation Testing of healthcare monitoring app
Test automation of digital payments using UIPath

11. Content Source: Medium
Contented by: Mindfire Solutions