Browsing by Subject "robotic process automation"

RPA (Robotic process automation) is an emerging field in software engineering that is applied in a wide variety of industries to automate repetitive business processes. While the tools to create RPA projects have evolved quickly, testing in these projects has not yet received much attention. The purpose of this thesis was to study how the regression testing of RPA projects created using UiPath could be automated while avoiding the following most common pitfalls of test automation projects: unreliability, too high cost, lack of re-usable components and too difficult implementation. An automated regression test suite was created as a case study with UiPath for an existing RPA project that is currently being tested manually. The results imply that UiPath can be used to also create the regression test suite, not just the RPA project. The automated test suite could be used to run all the tests in the regression test suite that is currently run manually. The common test automation project pitfalls were also mostly avoided: the structure of the project can be re-used for other test projects, the project can recover from unexpected errors and the implementation of the tests does not require a high level of programming knowledge. The main challenge proved to be the implementation cost which was increased by the longer then expected test development time. Another finding was that the measures taken to address test automation project pitfalls will likely work only with RPA projects that are simpler or as complex as the sample RPA project. With more complex projects, there will also likely be more challenges with test data creation. As a result, for complex projects, manual regression testing could be a better option.