Technology advances and innovations in the IT industry have been pushing enterprises to innovate for their business operations. Enterprise software applications are the new age solutions that companies develop to match an ever-changing market’s business needs. Extending the enterprise software is not enough as you will need an extensive testing mechanism to validate secure access to vital data.
Image Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/203428/total-enterprise-software-revenue-forecast/
According to Statista, the total IT spending on enterprise software will be $506 billion worldwide, with a year over the year growth rate of 8.8%. The cost of enterprise software development also includes expenditures on testing and fixing errors found during the tests.
So, how can we keep the testing automated and reduce errors?
The answer is simple, using the most advanced software testing approach called RPA or Robotic Process Automation.
What is RPA for software testing?
RPA or Robotic Process Automation tools are equipped with technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. It reduces the repetitive tasks in business operations to render automation.
If you consider the repetitive tasks that you need to reduce in software application testing, like logins, requesting data, assigning response, calculating the time of execution, and even memory consumptions are automated with RPA.
RPAs enable codeless testing to resolve queries, computations in testing, and maintenance of testing logs. It employs software bots or programmable bots that help mimic repetitive tasks otherwise being executed by humans.
When you are planning enterprise software development, there are many stages where automation can help improve efficiency. Any SDLC or Software development life cycle has the following steps,
- Defining the problem within the enterprise
- Designing the enterprise solution
- Developing the software solution
- Testing the software solution
- Deploying the enterprise software application
- Maintaining the ESA(Enterprise Software Application)
RPA can help enterprises to automate testing, deployment, and even maintenance of the ESAs by reducing the repetitive tasks, and simulations of testing environments. But, before you customize an RPA solution for your enterprise software solution, you should know the difference between ESAs, and others.
How is enterprise software different from others?
Enterprise software is different from your average software application used by businesses in many ways, such as basic structure and even deployments. Any company may be using two types of software- systems software and application software.
The systems software enables machines and computers of a business to execute general operations. Simultaneously, application software offers tools like documentation, spreadsheets, graphics, and others that companies can use.
Enterprise software is not for specific tools or functionalities that an application software offers and has more large scale attributes. ESAs can work across departments in an organizational structure rather than just a task-specific application.
Another aspect that makes ESAs different from other software is security. When you develop off-the-shelf software, there are from malicious sources, which can lead to data risks.
But, with enterprise software, you can ensure better security features, and as these are solo ownership tools, the chances of supply chain attacks are minimal. Apart from these attacks, ESAs can help make the data access within the organization secure than off-the-shelf software.
Now that we have some knowledge of ESAs let’s discover how RPA can help automate enterprise software testing.
Applying RPA for Enterprise Software Testing
RPA enables organizations to configure the software testing suites to emulate human actions and execute process testing seamlessly. Some of the essential applications RPA offers for automation across different domains are,
- Insurance policy management
- Patient analysis
- Employee onboarding
- Automated invoicing
- Testing automation
Here, it is essential to understand that RPA automates processes and integrates the user interface accordingly. So, if you want to test the UI side, there are other automation tools that you can try, like Docker, which offers an OS virtualization.
Implementing RPA needs bot validations before application in testing automation because a low-quality software bot will not render accurate results. Verifications must be done based on functionality, data integrity, and other factors.
So, here is how you can use RPA bots to maximize the software testing accuracy.
Step1: Identifying QA Pain-points
The first step towards integrating RPA into your enterprise software testing mechanism is identifying the repetitive tasks by QA. Here, you will need to plan the entire QA process setup and use extensive documentations to target repetitive tasks. These repetitive tasks can be anything like creating simulations, testing environments, maintaining logs of user interactions, and others.
Step2: Testing Requirements
Enterprise software has massive features that scale over different departments and assets of an organization. So, the testing requirements may differ from off-the-shelf commercial software. Before the integration of RPA bots, it is essential to identify the prerequisites of the testing suite.
Step3: Prioritizing
ESAs have many components that you will deploy, but it is necessary to identify the critical elements that will have the highest impact due to testing automation. So, instead of testing the entire process, you can minimize testing resources through targeted tests on prioritized components.
Step4: End-to-End Scripting
With RPA, you can enable the end-to-end scripting of testing mechanisms by integrating different open-source tools like Selenium, Katalon, Appium, and others. RPA bots can automate integrations among these tools by programmable APIs or Application Programming Interface. Enterprises can leverage the programming capabilities of the in-house development team or technical partners to create APIs.
Step5: Single Automation Script
RPA bots for software testing will need data patterns for training modules. You will need a single automation script that bots can use to execute and validate the impacted systems.
Step6: Reusable Scripts
Enterprises can reuse single automation scripts for higher environments with RPA bots. You can use these scripts for System Integration Testing(SIT) and User Acceptance Testing(UAT).
Integrating RPA into your ESA will need accurate testing data, accurate executions, and bot script validation. For example, you are creating an ERP software for a conglomerate with different firms working in several business domains. Now, the nature of employment, remuneration levels, and employees’ data patterns will vary across firms. For the execution of RPA bots for testing such an ESA, you will need a strategic plan.
Planning of the RPA based testing begins with data creation. Whether you need to create end-to-end scripts or a single automation script, data becomes quintessential. Sourcing data from different layers of enterprise structure can help with vital data.
Image Source: Robotic Process Automation and Quality Assurance – A Perspective (infosys.com)
Next, you will need trigger scripts that will execute bots for testing automation. Here, API codes can work as triggers and execute bots according to the organization’s priority. The testing automation will follow a process flow defined by the enterprise.
According to the process flow, RPA bots execute the automation scripts and render a test report for validations. Here, the data created before the tests from several sources can be compared with the test report to identify errors.
Conclusion:
RPA scripting needs skilled developers and experts, which may be one factor you will have to consider while integrating it with your ESA testing. The accuracy of testing automation will be higher than any other approach, which is why choosing RPA makes sense. Going forward, ESAs will see RPA integrations not only in the testing process but also in the development approach.
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