Test automation through RPA is a decisive shift to save time and facilitate the workflow for testing. That’s how RPA helps companies and organizations doing testing gain competitive strength.

Digital transformation dominates all the industries and even pushes companies to embrace new technologies to survive in the market. As a result, companies are going through a journey where they can grow the business with AI, Intelligent Automation (aka Hyper-Automation), and other software-based solutions to optimize all the operational and managerial processes.

RPA is one of the fastest-growing segments among the tech solutions through digital transformation and is expected to reach $11 billion by 2027, expanding at a CAGR of 34% from 2020 to 2027, according to Grand View Research.

If you are new to RPA, you may like this article: What is RPA: Robotic Process Automation for Beginners.

How can you use RPA for Software Test Automation?

Nowadays, time is precious more than ever. When developing an app, you need to launch it quickly as user behaviors and expectations change as swiftly as thought. That’s where RPA can help you by making testing more straightforward and faster.

Robot Process Automation or RPA is revolutionary;

to accelerate repetitive tasks such as regression, performance, and load testing.
to support the workflow by saving time spent on testing software.
to lower the risk of mistakes.

Business process automation is quite applicable in many software testing processes as the industry requires many data-based and repetitive tasks. For example, preparing test data, assembling preconditions, regression tests, and checking post-testing conditions are among the prominent use cases of RPA in testing.

What’s more: You can apply the whole scenario to large-scale software projects or expand your project smoothly due to the scalability feature of RPA.

In this way, IT, Test, and QA managers and teams can find time for tasks requiring human skills to improve their businesses and employee productivity.

Main differences between test automation and RPA

Test automation has helped companies to accelerate and automate various tasks. That’s why many testing professionals are not sure if they need to implement RPA. If you are also confused about the difference, here is a quick explanation:

You can apply test automation only to a product, while RPA enables you to automate all the business processes such as data entry, loan processing, form-filling, and onboarding.
Test automation is not as easy to execute as RPA as it has to be implemented across the environments related to the project. However, RPA can communicate with all the environments from one platform.
RPA provides easy access for all the users regardless of the number, while test automation is limited to a particular set of users. Therefore, RPA offers more significant opportunities for scalability.
You can also boost RPA with an AI engine to obtain smarter functions if needed, while test automation is only capable of executing defined code.

Benefits of RPA in testing

In an age when all industries are going through digital transformation, RPA becomes a fireball to get the maximum benefit from software testing. IT, Test, and QA teams can simplify the processes to test their software.

Here are some technical and operational benefits of RPA in testing:

Intuitive interface to design processes

RPA platforms usually provide a design studio, where you can design all the processes without coding. The Robusta RPA Modeler enables you to visually build, test, and debug the bots by dragging and dropping the functions and actions on a BPM-based interface. RPA solves considerable challenges in testing without coding with a rich library.

XPath Finder helps you locate objects, and the flexible Rule Engine allows you to manage the conditions of a process in a single Decision Table. You can even record the process of user actions to generate simple functions. In this way, productivity and maintainability increase drastically.

You may also check this article to learn how RPA and BPM work together.

Management environment for more control

RPA with a BPM engine can act as a workforce rather than simply being a bot so that you can coordinate and control all the processes. In addition, the Robusta Orchestrator enables administrators to have complete control over the deployment, management, and monitoring of RPA operations.

In this way, you will have role-based IDM functionality for managing roles and access rights, boosting security. The management environment also allows you to schedule processes and robots granularly after prioritizing the tasks. You can track these processes visually in the BPM methodology.

Defect management in detail for productivity

There will be defects. Finally, that’s why you are testing. For seamlessly working software, you need to manage defects in detail. The testing team should provide as much information as possible about defects when they notify the development team. So the corrections will be smooth and swift.

With RPA, IT, Test, and QA teams can collect a maximum amount of information. Additionally, the bots provide more accurate results, eliminating errors and the need for repeating actions. As a result, the team will have more time to document the defects effectively, increasing productivity.

Key takeaways

Testing requires many repetitive tasks for a detailed report on deficiencies and functionality of the software. RPA bots mastering acceleration and accuracy can help you boost productivity in a shorter time.

In a nutshell, here are the main features of RPA to support your testing processes:

No-code: Your team can drag&drop on a visual-based interface.
Simplicity: The design studio provides all you need to make processes simple.
Scalability: RPA will adapt to changes without extra effort as your team grows.
Cost-saving: You will need fewer people in the team whose productivity will maximize.
Accuracy: The bots are much less prone to errors.
Productivity: You will test your software in a shorter time with maximum detail.
Flexibility: RPA bots are adaptable to web-based, desktop, or mobile applications.

Get started with testing automation today, request a free demo, and we will show you all the possibilities of our testing automation software.