How a Change Resistant RPA Testing Strategy Can Help Reduce Bot Fragility
Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is increasingly embraced by business enterprises to automate repetitive and mundane activities related to software development and testing. The technology can be categorized as a disruptor given its estimated market value to touch $2,467 million by 2022 at a CAGR of 30.14% from 2017 to 2022 (Source: marketsandmarkets.com). The benefits of RPA technology for the industry are immense and include the ability to reduce operational costs, create business value, increase productivity, enhance quality, and others. However, notwithstanding the benefits that brought the technology to the center stage, it continues to be plagued by a serious problem – the breaking of bots due to change.
For instance, users may seldom notice changes in the software interface, such as login to logon or username to userid. Besides, these changes won’t get in the way of users’ completing specific tasks. However, when it comes to the RPA bots, they won’t budge or execute a particular task on noticing a change. In such a situation, the developers must dig deep into the problem to fix it. If this is the scenario for just one change for one process, then imagine the situation where hundreds of processes are involved.
Developers have to willy-nilly edit all processes to resolve a single change to one object. And should such changes occur frequently because of today’s dynamically changing IT environment, one can only imagine the prospect of making so many changes to the UI or connected APIs, among others. The result of such a situation will be the faltering of automation strategies, downtime, and lost business value. So, what needs to be done? The answer lies in crafting an RPA testing strategy that is resilient to change.
RPA testing strategies to make bots more adaptable?
To mitigate the fragility of RPA technology and drive efficiencies, RPA testing solutions should include the following:
Change management and resilient automation: Enterprise RPA should leverage a model-based intelligent object framework to streamline the maintenance of automation suites. Here, the object action framework, instead of manually updating every instance of a change across applications and processes, applies a one-to-many approach to replicate the change automatically across the software. In the RPA software testing model, a single definition is attached to a particular object. So, applying a fix to that definition can fix every bot or process that uses it. Thus, by fixing the central definition of an object, the effort to find the processes that use the object is eliminated.
Codeless automation: Debugging codes written by others is time-consuming and complex. It’s no wonder codeless technology is gaining popularity across the board for building applications. Also, enterprises do not need to write code to garner the benefits of RPA anymore, for there are codeless solutions to simplify the process of building and maintaining bots. This also enables non-technical users to become involved in bot maintenance.
Scalable automation: The true value of automation lies in reusing and sharing it across the value chain. Further, building an easily maintainable automation process is different from executing a thousand processes in an hour. In other words, automation can only benefit if it is scaled across the enterprise, especially to complex and high-volume processes. So, any RPA testing strategy should check the scalability of automation to processes and whether the outcomes of such processes are accurate and consistent with expectations.
Integrated automation: Any automation process running in production should not fail, for the consequences can be dire for the entire value chain. Robotic test automation has become an efficient approach to executing testing in production environments. It can validate complex business processes across the production pipeline. Given that most applications and their processes are highly integrated within the production environments, the robotic process automation approach should apply to all applications.
Conclusion
There should be a synergy between RPA and testing in order to automate testing and apply the same across processes, teams, and projects. It should enhance the capabilities of business enterprises for governance, RPA orchestration, and security. Also, by executing the automated process in testing in the same way you would be running in RPA, you can ensure the bots work properly. Finally, should you want automation to deliver ROI, it is better to implement a change-resilient robotic process software testing solution. This allows you to make the best use of your time while expanding RPA and adding value to your business.
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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.
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