Robotic process automation (RPA) is being well received by businesses across industries for its capability to automate manual tasks in various workflows like automating smoke testing during the development and production phase. A software bot is a valuable addition to the system testing suite since it can analyze data and make smart decisions. The benefits of RPA are growing with popular RPA solutions like UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere driving the technology and playing a crucial part in the testing environment.

RPA testing strategy may include creating requirements and processes, testing workflow handling system compatibility, auditing, and continuous bot monitoring ensuring swift deployment. RPA testing is also critical to provide exceptional customer services ensuring security, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and customer satisfaction.

Agile Approach to Deliver RPA Testing at Scale

To deal with the flaws of robotic process automation, businesses must use an agile strategy to build and deploy automation programs. Adopting agile to your RPA operations may improve governance and flexibility for future growth, increase efficiency, eliminate risks and reduce expenses significantly.

Some of the flaws in RPA testing are:

• In waterfall testing, testing is carried out only after the development is completed
• It is difficult for the testing team to initiate any change after the development
• A team’s capacity to coordinate is severely restricted.

Let’s decode the Agile-driven test strategy in RPA with the following steps:

• Purpose (defined by the user story)
• Create a test case (from that user story)
• Scope (what needs to be tested)
• Generate a test run (to validate the user story)

1. Purpose – The acceptance criteria are a set of conditional use cases that validate the implementation of the user story.

2. Create a Test Case – For defining test cases, create a test scenario and identify it by workflow testing, exception testing, and business rules validation. Test scenarios can be derived by Boundary Value Analysis (BVA), Equivalence Class Partitioning, and Error Guessing.

3. Scope – To ensure changes to your code work as intended, you can test them using a variety of techniques:

• Smoke Testing: Smoke Testing process determines if the deployed software is stable or not • Functional Testing: Functional testing validates the software system against the functional requirements/specifications.
• Integration Testing: In integration testing, software modules are integrated logically and tested together
• End-to-End Testing: End-to-end testing is a process to check if applications are working as intended, preserving the data flow for all procedures.

4. Generate a test run: Test Run is done to validate the user story and review Test cases with PA (Process Architects) to achieve 100% test coverage.

Test Readiness Review

A Test Readiness Review (TRR) is a formal approval indicating the system is ready to enter the test. The TRR will inspect and verify the test products, test results, and environment is complete and accurate for the next test phase.

This table shows the status checklist of all tests. If all test status is PASS, then we can start with Test execution/Test Run.

Test Readiness Review (TRR) Criteria Checklist	Status
All the requirements are analyzed	Pass
Test Cases preparation done (Positive & Negative)	Pass
Test Case review and sign off	Pass
Test Data availability	Pass
Smoke Testing	Pass

Here are some points to consider during the execution of a test run.

• Prepare Test data i.e., Data Setup (Mimics Production Data, Exception Testing) for running the test case.
• Test for High Volume Data depending on the process
• Test for Performance of high-volume data (Note down the time taken to process each record)
• In UAT, test for workflow validation, exceptions validation and environment capability
• Before running production, run UAT for 3 to 4 days and send results to the PA for Validation.
• Prepare an exit criteria checklist after the test case execution and share it with PA.

Exit Criteria Checklist	Status
100% of test cases executed	Pass
95% pass rate of the test cases	Pass
No open critical and high-severity defects	Pass
95% of medium-severity defects have been closed	Pass
All remaining defects are either canceled or documented as change requests for a future release	Pass
Test metrics are collected based on reports from JIRA	Pass
Defects are logged in JIRA	Pass
Test Closure Memo is completed and signed off	Pass
Regression testing / End to end Testing done	Pass

Note:

• Exit Criteria: Exit Criteria identify the items to be completed before testing
• Exit Criteria for STLC (Software Test Life Cycle) phases can be defined as items /documents/actions/tasks that must be completed before concluding the testing phase.
• A test can be executed only if every checklist in the aforementioned template is Pass

Key Benefits of RPA Testing

• RPA testing cuts down the processing time
• It enhances product quality while accelerating the development turnaround time
• RPA offers better productivity and accuracy with the User Acceptance Test.
• Easy integration with artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize processes

Conclusion

The demand for quality products from customers has elevated the need for RPA testing to a new level for development operations. RPA testing based on agile methodology offers clear advantages to organizations looking to enhance their development process.

Agile RPA testing is an important part of the deployment life cycle, as it streamlines the business processes. Test teams invest time and money in developing quality software to automate these tests, which are otherwise time-consuming and tedious. With an Agile RPA framework in place, testing solutions become less complicated and require little time to set up, allowing your team to get down to crucial testing quickly.

Automation in RPA testing can be complex. Opteamix offers a robust RPA solution for enterprises seeking digital transformation in Banking, Insurance, Retail, health care, and other Industries. If you are looking to implement RPA to automate your processes, get in touch with our RPA expert who can help you identify the best solution for your use case and drive maximum ROI on your RPA investments.

Download our Robotic Process Automation white paper to learn how Opteamix can help you with the right RPA strategy that suits your business needs.