# Infosys Whitepaper 
Title: The future of enterprise test automation 
Author: Infosys Limited 
Format: PDF 1.7 

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 WHITE PAPER RPA: THE FUTURE OF ENTERPRISE  TEST AUTOMATION 

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 RPA: The future of enterprise test automation If one word defines the 21st century,  it  would be speed. Never before has progress  happened at such a breakneck pace.  We have moved from discrete jumps of  innovation to continuous improvement and  versioning. The cycle time to production  is at an all-time low. In this era of constant  innovation where the supreme need is to  stay ahead of the competition and drive  exceptional user experiences, product  quality deployed in production is paramount  to ensure that speed does not derail  the product as a whole. A robust testing  mechanism ensures quality while allowing  faster release and shorter time to market –  so essential for that competitive edge.   Today, USD 550bn is spent on testing and  validation annually. It is also the second  largest IT community in the world. That is a  significant investment and effort being put  into this space already, but is it delivering  results? In the past five or so years, there has  been a push from CXOs, based on  recommendations from industry experts  and analysts, to go for extreme automation.  Companies have been adopting multiple  tools, opensource technologies, and  building enterprise automation frameworks.  This attempt to achieve end-to-end  automation has created a mammoth  network of tool sets in the organization that  may or may not work well with each other.  This is how test automation was done  conventionally; it still  requires elaborate  effort to build test scripts, significant  recurring investment for subscription  and licensing, and training and knowhow  for multiple tools. By some estimates,  traditional testing can take up to 40% of  total development time – that is untenable  in the agile and DevOps modes companies  operate in today.  What if this ongoing effort can be  eliminated? What if the need for multiple  tools can be done away with? Enter Robotic  Process Automation (RPA) in testing. While  originally not built for testing, RPA tools  show great potential to make testing more  productive, more efficient, and help get  more features to the market faster – giving  them an edge over conventional tools (see  Fig 1).   The state of testing and validation in the enterprise  Product features Traditional automation tools RPA Tools Coding Knowledge •  Coding knowledge is essential to  develop automated scripts •  Programming knowledge and effort is  needed to build the framework, generic  reusable utilities and libraries •   These tools offer codeless automation. Developing automated  scripts requires some effort for configuration and workflow  design. However, coding is minimal compared to traditional  tools •   Generic reusable utilities are available as plug-and-play  components Maintenance Extensive maintenance effort required Minimal  test maintenance effort required Cognitive automation No support for cognitive automation RPA tools are popular for supporting cognitive automation by  leveraging AI Plugin support Limited plugins are available for different  technologies Plugins are available for all leading technologies Orchestration and load  distribution Load distribution during execution requires  additional effort to develop the utilities   and set up the infrastructure This feature is available in most RPA tools. For example, feature  of a popular RPA tool helps in load distribution during execution  without any additional effort aside from configuration Automation development  Productivity Test development productivity is low since  custom coding is required most of the time Test development productivity is high as most generic activities  are available as plug-and-play OCR for text recognition This feature is not available This feature is available in all RPA tools Advanced image  recognition This feature is not available. Either  additional scripting or a third-party tool is  needed to support this This feature is available in all RPA tools In-built screen and data  scarping wizards This feature is not available and requires  integration with other tools This feature is available in all RPA tools Fig. 1: Traditional automation tools vs. RPA External Document © 2020 Infosys Limited 

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 External Document © 2018 Infosys Limited RPA – the next natural  evolution of testing  automation  In the last decade, automation has  evolved and matured with time along  with changing technologies. As discussed,  automation in testing is not new but  its effectiveness has been a challenge –  especially the associated expense and lack  of skill sets. RPA can cut through the maze  of tool sets within an enterprise, replacing  them with a single tool that can talk to  heterogenous technology environments.   From writing stubs to record and playback,  to modular and scriptless testing,  and now to bots, we are witnessing a  natural evolution of test automation. In  this 6th Gen testing brought about by  RPA orchestration, an army of bots will  drastically change the time, effort, and  energy required for testing and validation.  We are heading towards test automation  that requires no script, no touch,  works across heterogenous platforms,  creates extreme automation, and allows  integration with opensource and other  tools.<|endoftext|>According to Forrester¹, “RPA brings  production environment strengths to  the table.” This translates into production  level governance, a wide variety of use  cases, and orchestration of complex  processes via layers of automation.  RPA allows companies to democratize  automation very rapidly within the testing  organization.  RPA has an advantage over traditional tools  in that it can be deployed where they fail  to deliver results (see Fig 2). For instance,  when:  • the testing landscape is heterogenous  with complex data flows • there is a need for attended and  unattended process validation  • there is a need to validate digital system  needs An RPA solution can bring in a tremendous  amount of simplicity for building out bots  quickly and deploying them with the  least amount of technical know-how and  skills that even business stakeholders can  understand.<|endoftext|>External Document © 2020 Infosys Limited 

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 However, the challenges in testing are not  limited to writing and executing test cases.  The automation needs to also handle the  periphery of testing activities – validating  that all components of the environment  are up and running and that test data is  available on time. This dependency on  the peripheral activities, and the teams  running them, could cost valuable time.  For instance, for a large banking client, this  dependency put a lot of pressure on the  testing team to finish a sprint in 5 days.  Using RPA, we were able to automate the  batch monitoring and batch rendering  process. We also automated synthetic test  data creation and data mining processes   reducing time to market by 40%.  To really provide value for testing and  validation, RPA needs to provide some very  testing specific capabilities such as:  A Cohesive Automation Platform:  Enabling enterprises to leverage the full  potential of automation with process  discovery, process automation (attended,  unattended, and UI based), combined with  process orchestration capabilities. This  should include a test automation interface  that can bridge the gap between test  management tools and automated test  cases. A workflow-driven test automation  approach can make the solution business- centric.  Native AI Capabilities:  A cognitive  engine can leverage various data sources  to deliver pervasive intelligence across  process design, management, and  execution.<|endoftext|>Security and Scalability: The solution  should allow running multiple bots on a  single virtual machine, have robust access  management with a credential vault built  into the product, and offer out-of-the-box  technology-specific adaptors Fig 2. How RPA tools address traditional testing challenges Challenge Areas Performance of RPA tools Test Data Management Data-driven testing is supported by many traditional tools. RPA can manage data  form files like Excel/JSON/XML/DB and use these for testing Testing in different environments End-to-end business processes navigate through various environments like  mainframe/web/DB/client server applications. RPA tools can easily integrate this  process across multiple systems. Thus, RPA tools simplify business orchestration and  end-to-end testing compared to other testing tools Traceability While RPA tools do not directly provide test script traceability, there are methods to  enable this functionality. For instance, user stories/requirements stored in JIRA can  be integrated with RPA automation scripts using Excel mappings to create a wrapper  that triggers execution Script versioning A batch process can be implemented in the RPA tool to address this CI-CD integration This is available in most of the RPA Tools Reporting and defect logging RFA tools have comprehensive dashboards that showcase defects that can be logged  in Excel or JIRA through a suitable wrapper Error handling This feature is available in all RPA tools External Document © 2020 Infosys Limited