Consequences of having an “Alarm-approach” for maintaining your BOTS

Does your automation break at production, followed by the many sleepless nights and busy weekends to monitor and upgrade your Bot. This is very inevitable, with the current reactive approach, your RPA BOTS will gradually reach a dead-end, due to many fuss around the frequent application changes, and the later cost for maintenance is high. 

According to the study by IBM, the relative cost to fix bugs, is 100x in Production and Maintenance stage.

Well, you may face such challenges if your program does not include a structured practise to proactively handle the changes to the dependent applications. That is where continuous development and continuous testing with UiPath Test Suite will prove to be a beneficial resource.

The Missing puzzle to RPA development cycle – Continuous Automated Testing

Working under the modern development approach includes having development in short time-boxed iterations, to plan, design, build, and test an initial version. Iterations continue until a development version is deemed production-ready and deployed in a release.

Once in production, the Bot is continuously monitored and tested for any regressions. Any issues found are proactively addressed before impacting production, and additional feedback is recorded. These are the key factors followed in the modern version of agile software development; the same applies to RPA development. One missing piece of puzzle to add to RPA development is Continuous Automated Testing capability.

Perks of including RPA Testing to development cycle

With automated testing, developers can write automated test sets once and re-execute these test sets repeatedly. These tools map tests to requirements, manage test cases, execute tests, capture and report results, and track defects. To adopt continuous automation development, RPA teams need to have automated test capabilities, and all of these underlying capabilities are incorporated into the UiPath Test Suite.

How UiPath Test Suite is the bridge between Application Testing and RPA Testing?

UiPath Test Suite combines the world's leading Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology with best-of-breed testing capabilities to sustainably accelerate scaling through proactive testing, crossenterprise collaboration, and a continuous approach to create and deploy automations. With

Test Suite, we can incorporate continuous testing as an integral part of building Bots, implementing this in a four-step process.

1. Plan the robot requirements and test cases

 2. Build automated test cases to ensure all workflow paths are covered

3. Continuously monitor robot health by testing robots

4. Act before a robot breaks by proactively maintaining robots before issues surface in production

Automated testing capabilities make continual monitoring easy and scalable with Test Suite. As in a Continuous environment, CICD triggers Test Bots on any changes or updates made in the underlying application. The test Bot executes relevant test-sets to check the integration and functional impact on the Bot's workflow. The defects, i.e., the failed test cases, are identified and added in an ALM tool like Jira, and the RPA developer can then proactively work to fix the issue.

To have a more resilient working Bot, it is crucial to continuously monitor the robot’s health before it impacts operations. In ever-changing environments and applications, this approach helps to spot and fix the issue proactively.

UiPath Test Suite is the first of its kind to offer automated RPA testing capabilities. Test Suite makes RPA development more effective, allowing developers to build more, test better, and continuously monitor