Published: 01 Oct 2020
Robot-led Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite. Findings and Viewpoint of TestingXperts
Last Updated: 28 Oct 2021
As a trusted UiPath partner with deep expertise in Quality Engineering and Test Automation, we at TestingXperts have been part of the evolution journey of RPA powered
UiPath Test Suite. While the product is still finding its feet in the market, we worked on evaluating UiPath Test Suite for its capabilities as a Continuous Testing tool.
What is Bot-led Testing?
Bot-led testing is an advanced software testing process in which RPA tools and bots are leveraged to test the complex applications of today’s digital era. These bots ensure enterprise-wide digitalization at a faster pace when compared to other testing methods. RPA based bot led testing helps testers ensure a faster testing process without any manual intervention. Thus, it eliminates the chances of human-prone errors, resulting in higher testing accuracy and increased test coverage.
TestingXperts have developed an extensible end-to-end test automation framework using UiPath Test Suite which is DevOps ready and has integration with various third-party tools like JIRA, Jenkins, HTML reports, BrowserStack, etc.
The intent of the framework development is to make a robust, reusable, and fully compatible automation framework wherein new components and processes can be easily accommodated without impacting its existing components.
TestingXperts Test Automation Framework powered by UiPath
TestingXperts Test Automation Framework powered by UiPath uses the page object model design principle & contains the below components/integrations:
● GitHub [code repository]
● Continuous Integration (CI) [Jenkins & Azure Devops]
● Orchestrator [Manage robots]
● BrowserStack Integration [For iOS mobile Automation]
● Data Layer [Excel, JSON]
● Utilities [Wrapper XAML files to handle typical test automation issues]
● Reporting in the following formats:
» UiPath Insights [Reporting Dashboard]
» Standalone HTML reports
» Email Notifications
» Defect creation on JIRA
» UiPath Test Manager
While this framework is continuously being enhanced to include many more features and making it more scalable, maintainable and configurable, we conducted a Proof of Concept (PoC) to validate usability and extensibility of developed components and explored features available within UiPath Test Suite. In this PoC, we developed Robots to create complex automation test scenario for web, mobile, desktop and API that gets triggered through built-in CI Pipeline i.e. Jenkins..
We have listed down a few findings from the PoC, and these are based on our experience working with other test automation products that are commercially available as well highly used open-source tools like Selenium.
Overall, we find the UiPath platform easy to use and one that brings market-leading capabilities within areas like test creation, execution & reporting. Test creation is very intuitive, and it doesn’t require any special coding skills to build
automated tests.
We could utilize functional test engineers with NO test automation background and scale them to learn to create test scripts using Robots within significantly less time. Some positives that we noticed are listed below:
● Test execution capabilities on multiple machines, distributed across teams and through job scheduling makes the execution process autonomous and straightforward. (Ease with which we can publish our code to Orchestrator & execute on any machine, share it across teams, and on top of all that scheduling jobs is very convenient)
● Control identification: The automation framework is highly robust as it supports data-driven testing, integrates with various packages. It’s control identification using image recognition is reliable compared to other tools. (Although UiPath uses image recognition & OCR & control properties, image recognition on UiPath seems to be more reliable to what has been seen on other prominent tools.)
● Dashboard: The reporting/ dashboard capabilities provided by ‘UiPath Insights’ gives significant statistics, metrics and analytics with the flexibility to play with raw data available in SQL server. (UiPath Test Suite hooks to a SQL server at backend & posts various stats in DB. This opens up a plethora of options to play with & create any kind of stats we want to display. UiPath Insights does give a lot of these stats out-of-the-box)
Below are the key metrics we found in terms of value and improvements in test automation,
UiPath Test Suite brings:
We also noted some of the areas where we would like to see some improvements in their platform:
● Improved script maintenance for lengthy and complex workflows – the visualization of test cases can become tricky to follow
● Support for WCF services when it comes to API automation – though it is legacy now but something to be considered
● Improved product distribution and deployment process – one-touch installation instead of separate installation for various components of UiPath Test Suite (UiPath Studio, UiPath Orchestrator and UiPath Test Manager)
Overall, UiPath Test Suite is an exciting addition to the already competitive test automation market. The initial results look very promising and the solution we built on top of UiPath Test Suite comes across as fairly ROBUST and RELIABLE.
For more information, please feel free to contact us or email us at [email protected]