RPA (Robotic Process Automation) Testing| Benefits | Methodology

In today’s era where EQ is more preferred than IQ, there is a heavy need for employees who can do real human jobs instead of some monotonous robot jobs.

People lose interest in low value-adding jobs which increases chances of error, but not robots!

Automation testing has become very integral part of the software testing.

We can automate things to do boring and repetitive stuff. And RPA is best suited for it. There are many benefits of RPA testing automation.

Let’s see what are all the topics we are going to cover in this article.

Let’s dive in.

What is RPA (Robotic Process Automation)?

To save employees from doing uninteresting jobs and getting these jobs done smoothly in a much lesser time the technology that comes in the picture is Robotic Process Automation.

As the name suggests it is the automation of most of the robotic processes happening in any enterprise.

Advantages of RPA Automation Testing

Robotic Process Automation has proven itself as a big asset and has great advantages like:

1. Reducing human effort and errors.
2. Saving time along with boosting productivity, accuracy, and consistency.
3. Enhancing business analytics.

Difference between RPA and Automation?

Let’s see how different RPA is from traditional IT automation with some examples and applications.

1. Role of RPA in Calculation:

Earlier we used to calculate numbers manually. Gradually, the complexity of the problems increased; also manual calculations took a lot of time. Therefore, in 1966, Texas Instruments invented the hand-held pocket calculator which automated calculations. But, we still had to feed these numbers manually in the calculator.

RPA replaces Human Intervention by leveraging Software Robots (popularly known as Bots).

2. Automating Data Entry Jobs using RPA:

Let’s see a typical Data Entry Employee’s task: A data entry employee repeatedly gets the data from different sources and aggregates them in an Excel file. Replacing the Data Entry Employee with a bot. Bot mimics all the tasks done by the Data Entry employee.

3. RPA for Invoice Processing:

In earlier times, an Admin used to segregate the invoices based on the type of automobile it is related to. After this, it was forwarded to the workers, who used to process it further.

It was a time-consuming task for the Admin, as there were thousands of invoices to categorize every day. There was also a probability, that the Admin will make mistakes in categorizing the invoices.

Companies decided to automate the process of categorization of invoices by replacing the Admin with an Automated System.

Even after automating this process, invoice processing was still done manually. Then the company implemented RPA to automate the invoice processing and completely eliminated the human intervention.

Though automation could segregate the invoices by the reading the subject of the emails, we still needed human force to read these scanned invoices.

Hence we needed an automation solution that could read like a human.

Benefits of RPA Testing Automation

There are some major benefits of RPA, such as

• RPA systems mimic human behavior with no change to the existing infrastructure.
• It does not integrate with the underlying software; it rather uses the software’s user interface to operate on it.
• Solutions can be developed faster since they are not dependent on the underlying software.
• RPA automation results in cost reduction since it reduces the need of human workforce significantly to do the same work.

Related Read: There is also one more tool for automating functional testing called JMeter. Read about it.

How does RPA work?

Imagine a scenario, where you want to get the list of names and prices of all the phones of a particular brand from a website.

This is how a typical automation process should look like:

Identify the elements -> Define the structure -> Create the result file -> Run the automation bot.

RPA Testing Methodology

Let’s take an example. You have to automate the testing for an e-commerce website using RPA.

Identify the Elements

1. Go to the e-commerce site
2. Search for the phone brand
3. Select the elements you want to extract
4. Example: Name and Price

Define the Structure

1. Define the structure of the CSV file containing
2. Name and Price column
3. These columns will be populated automatically after the automation process

Create the Result File

1. Give a name to the CSV file where the data will be stored
2. Automation will store the extracted data in the specified CSV file

Run the Bot

1. Run the automation from your RPA tool.
2. It will populate all the extracted data into the CSV file.

From this article, I am sure you learned what exactly RPA is, benefits of RPA testing, how RPS is different from traditional automation and it’s working.

Knowing about RPA will also help you in interviews if you are applying for testing profile jobs like in TCS.

There were some RPA questions asked in Pole to Win interview for testing profile.

If you have any doubts and have something to share about RPA, let us know in the comments below.

Megha Pathak

I am a Research Proficient interested in most of what computer science offers. My main interest revolves around Analytics and Automation. Trying to explore different career options where two of my traits Creativity and Technology meet, to find out my Passion.