Author: Ravneet Arora, RPA Consultant
I started my career as a Manual Tester at a large organization. There were close to 40 members in a QA team working for an offshore client. This experience made me realize the importance of Software Testing. After a few months as a Manual Tester, I was introduced to the concept of Automation Testing—a testing technique that automatically checks the execution of tests using an automation tool, instead of a human manually testing.
Automated Testing Tools I’ve Used
Selenium, Appium, Cucumber, and SoapUI were a few of the testing tools that I had an opportunity to work with while developing automated scripts to test the complex pre-build software. Selenium’s power to automate web browsers effectively enables rapid feedback to developers. Appium excels in automating the mobile web applications, while Cucumber powers the end user experience with reusable code, making testing efficient and easy. SoapUI is a functional testing tool mainly to test APIs. Automated tests have defined the milestones of speed while bringing in the best quality for software requirements, thus enabling continuous development, integration, testing, and deployment. Even after realizing the benefits of Automation Testing, we faced continuous challenges. For complicated and complex software building, Selenium test scripts were not the right fit. The time and costs of automated tests increased dramatically, impacting the overall momentum of the organization.
Moving Into The World Of RPA
I started to feel a lack of excitement in my current role, so I started exploring other jobs which suited both my profile and my interest. This is when I was introduced to the world of RPA. The technology was automating redundant, boring tasks with unbelievable accuracy. When I was introduced to RPA, I started wondering, “What would testing look like in an RPA workflow?”. The RPA process workflow was quick and easy to develop across different platforms, for Web, Desktop, Java, and Windows applications.
Developing the RPA process was a swift and reliant process – helping organizations automate their manual process widely. In order to make these processes more stable, robust testing of these workflows was a necessity. We could not build automated test scripts, as the time required to build the automated test cases, then integrate with the existing UiPath workflow was not easy. In order to test the RPA process, manual testing was back in the game, leveraging different aspects of testing such as performance, load, application, and integration.
There Was Still A Challenge
One leg of the challenge was still hanging. The manual efforts required to test the RPA process required a lot of man-hours, which was not cost-effective for most organizations. The biggest challenge was that organizations were unwilling to accept testing as an integral part of the development process. As a repercussion, most of the RPA developers were stuck doing the job for both a developer and tester. While we were trying to overcome the struggles of RPA Testing, UiPath came up with a solution—Test Suite!
What is Test Suite?
UiPath Test Suite is a tightly integrated bundle of tools that consolidates the testing process through integrations with the test management and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools. It is the test framework, which has end-to-end test automation functionalities. The biggest advantage of Test Suite was the time saved for the RPA teams, accelerating their chances to scale. RPA developers can create test cases directly from their existing workflows and execute them using UiPath Orchestrator. Testers can now create and edit requirements, or view test logs and results in Test Manager, UiPath’s test management tool. Test Suite helps to integrate all of the testing activities under the same platform so that it’s easier to test and maintain workflows. Other features of Test Suite include:
Studio Pro
Studio Pro is the superior version of Studio, where you can easily create test automation workflows or convert the existing workflows to the respective test case.
Test Manager
The main purpose of Test Manager is to integrate UiPath Test Suite with third-party ALM tools, such as Jira and CI/CD tools like Azure DevOps and GIT. Through its flexible connector architecture, it can be used to integrate any ALM tool that provides a compatible API to:
- Assign test cases to requirements, user stories, or any other artefact
- Create bug reports in an external bug tracking system supplemented with log information and screenshots from test executions
Some of the functions of Test Manager include:
- Linking automated test cases in Studio Pro to manual test cases in Test Manager
- Assigning test cases to requirements
- Reporting, including dashboards to get a quick overview of your test results
- Manual testing
- Creating defects directly from test results
- Add documentation to manual test cases
Orchestrator
Tests can be deployed and scheduled through Orchestrator. Orchestrator can execute test cases from Studio Pro on testing robots. This can be done in a scheduled manner or build-driven through a CI/CD pipeline.
Why Should You Use Test Suite?
Test Suite benefits those who create automations and businesses who depend on automations. RPA teams can create more resilient robots to scale automations sustainably with comprehensive RPA testing. In addition, RPA tests can be data-driven to ensure robots can handle different data variations before they are deployed to production. Test teams can automate testing of virtually any software application by empowering the best testing capabilities, including mobile, SAP, web, desktop, Citrix, DevOps, and ALM integration.
How I’m Using Automated Testing Now
With our clients, we intend to develop an end-to-end Test Automation framework using Test Suite (which is DevOps ready). We are building a robust automation framework, which consists of reusable components, and can easily be scaled to include new components and automations. We are building all the functionalities in the form of libraries so that these can be operationalized and scaled up as actual processes in production.
UiPath has revolutionized the definition of test automation. Testers can now automate their own testing workflows instead of performing redundant, manual tasks.
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