A Guide to Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Robotic process automation (RPA) is useful across a number of different industries and applications—including software development. Learn everything you need to know about RPA, including RPA testing, and how your developers and testers can use it with Ranorex Studio to test smarter and streamline their work.
What Is Robotic Process Automation?
Robotic process automation (RPA) is an advanced type of business process automation that allows robots or software to emulate the tasks a human would normally perform. This frees up time that your developers or software testers would otherwise spend performing repetitive or high-volume tasks and allows them to work on more creative or complex parts of the project.
Benefits of Robotic Process Automation in Software Testing
Software testing with RPA allows developers and testers to automate repetitive processes. Automating them allows testers to perform tests faster and more efficiently—without requiring human input. This increases productivity around testing and for your team overall since it enables your team to work on different tasks within the project.
Even more, robotic process automation allows you to streamline your workflow. As a result, your team will be able to focus on more complex or complicated tasks without someone needing to constantly oversee the testing process.
Having to conduct the same task over and over again can become monotonous, which can end up being the recipe for more errors in your testing process. Using RPA software testing guarantees better consistency and accuracy across your tests.
As an RPA testing tool, Ranorex Studio integrates with a variety of different applications to streamline your software development process. It seamlessly integrates with issue and defect management tools like JIRA and Bugzilla, but that’s only the beginning.
Some of the data management tools it integrates with include:
- SQL
- Microsoft Excel
- CSV
It also integrates with test management programs such as:
- TestRail
- TestShell
- TestBench
- SpiraTeam
- aqua
- HP Quality Center
- Qualicen
These are just a few of the integrations Ranorex Studio offers—there are a lot more integrations we offer for your entire development lifecycle.
RPA tools are inherently designed to be scaled with your organization. By advancing your processes, you can increase efficiency and enhance productivity—which ultimately reduces operating costs. As your team takes on new projects, you can further automate your processes to keep up with each project’s needs.
Robotic process automation can be used in many different ways, including as a way to more quickly respond to customer needs. Whereas some manual processes can take several weeks to complete, robotic process automation takes care of it in a fraction of the time when set up correctly.
Who Uses RPA?
As one of the top intelligent automation strategies in today’s software development landscape, RPA can be used across multiple industries, including:
Financial Institutions
Banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions can use robotic process automation to streamline data entry, data transfers, and other repetitive tasks employees would normally perform.
Healthcare
Healthcare organizations can utilize RPA to automate insurance processing, patient record keeping, insurance billing, and other operational tasks.
Insurance Companies
Given the sheer amount of customer data they work with, insurance providers can use RPA to automate the claims process and transfer of customer information.
Government Agencies
Government agencies at all levels of service can use RPA to easily transfer and otherwise handle resident and constituent data.
Engineering Firms
Engineers can use RPA to ensure accuracy and consistency within their blueprints, formulas, and equations to design safer structures.
Software Development
Software companies can use robotic process automation across all types of testing scenarios. Common forms of testing in RPA include regression tests, cross-browser testing, functional testing, and more.
RPA also helps software development firms ensure that they meet compliance requirements. All it takes is setting the bot to operate within regulations and you’ll never have to worry about it staying compliant with software industry standards or regulations.
Can RPA Be Used for Test Automation?
Yes—in fact, RPA software testing is the future of test automation and can save your developers hours while contributing positively to your ROI. Ranorex Studio can be used to implement RPA testing by creating test cases to serve as your “bot,” without needing to add a validation step.
Your team can then organize the bot into a test suite that serves as the “job.” From there, the job behaves as it normally would for automated testing. This makes the process of transitioning between RPA and testing easy for your team.
An Example of RPA in Test Automation
You can use RPA to assist with setting up a variety of tools that support test automation. For example, if you’re trying to set up an automated functional test for a web-based app, you can set up your RPA program to perform many of the same actions your testers would use to interact with the application, including:
- Logging into the app, with and without errors
- Interact with widgets and other GUI components
- Create and edit files
- And more
Once you’ve trained the RPA testing bot to perform the actions you would normally do within your application, you can run it in sequence. From there, the testing bot will be able to perform your tests much faster and with better accuracy.
How Ranorex Can Help
Ranorex Studio makes it easy to implement robotic process automation with your testing process, without requiring dedicated coding knowledge. Working in tandem as an RPA solution, it offers suite of software tools allows you to perform all types of automated testing, including:
- Black box testing
- Cross-browser testing
- Data-driven testing
- Keyword-driven testing
- Automation intelligence
- And a suite of other automated testing tools
Start a Free Trial of Ranorex Studio
Ranorex is an all-in-one testing tool that makes it easier to conduct dozens of different types of tests across all your application’s platforms. See for yourself how it can help your team perform better with RPA by requesting a free trial today.
Selenium WebDriver can be a powerful tool for developers who want the convenience of Ranorex Studio with the features of Selenium. To test out Selenium WebDriver for yourself and see how Ranorex Studio can transform your automated testing, contact us for your free trial today.