Intelligent process automation (IPA) is the new upgrade to the basic automation. It is the next level in the ongoing growth of process automation with machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP). Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) is the combination of technologies that come together to manage, automate, and integrate digital processes. The primary technologies that make up IPA include Digital Process Automation (DPA), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Digital Process Automation (DPA): It describes the agile set of intelligent process automation technologies that have evolved from their roots in Business Process Management Technology. DPA provides the agility and insight needed to enable an integrated approach to automating business processes. It enables the user to manage the flow of data across the user’s enterprise and makes it easier to identify areas for improvement and make agile changes.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA): It brings speed and efficiency to IPA. Deploying robots that mimic human actions to help reduce very manual and labour-intensive tasks, such as re-keying data from one system to another.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): It contributes great intelligence and decisions to the mix. This brings another level of thinking to the automation as AI can analyze data in a way that a human could not, recognizing patterns in data and learning from past decisions to make increasingly intelligent choices.

IPA mimics activities carried out by humans and, over time, learns to do them even better. Traditional levers of rule-based automation are augmented with decision-making capabilities thanks to advances in deep learning and cognitive technology. The promise of IPA is radically enhanced efficiency, increased worker performance, reduction of operational risks, and improved response times and customer journey experiences.

Benefits of Intelligent Process Automation

Orchestration of humans and robots –Intelligent Process Automation can help to co-ordinate work between robots, people, and systems preferably than simply deploying technologies like RPA in silos and leaving them to complete individual tasks. Robotics are all well and good, but unless the user integrates them with an IPA platform, the user will end up with isolated solutions as opposed to enterprise-wide solutions.

Freeing up employees from routine tasks – Employees can be free from labour-intensive tasks by RPA and set to work in more efficiency areas. The user can rest assured that the correct decision is being made by combining with DPA and AI, because it is planned out in the workflow with AI helping to make informed decisions along the way.

Ensuring proper governance and minimizing risk –The user can reduce the risk of errors such as incorrect data entry by automating end-to-end processes. RPA takes care of this automating tasks, but if it breaks or deviates from the organizational standard, IPA gives the user the peace of mind knowing that the user’s processes are consistently being completed.

End-to-end visibility of processes and the customer journey – It can be hard to see the enterprise-wide result when individual automation technologies are deployed. Using IPA, the user can see the entire process, allowing the user to identify bottlenecks or points at which the customer journey could be smoother.

Agility and speed of process change – IPA enables the user to not only accelerate end-to-end processing but also makes it easy to make agile changes to processes and the technologies that support them. This helps organizations to continually improve their business processes.

How it is Different?

Traditional process automation works by following clear, step-by-step rules. Whether it’s BPA or RPA, it will do the same things the same way every time. These tools don’t adapt, they do as they’re either told or shown.

Meanwhile, intelligent process automation is more flexible. It includes all the capabilities found in RPA but adds extra scope and functionality. This means that when it comes to using intelligent process automation, there’s less handholding/hard coding required to set the needed rules. Plus, IPA can learn from feedback and adapt to changes in real-time.

What is the main Difference Between RPA and IPA?

Intelligent Process Automation and Robotic Process Automation are similar processes; but IPA can cover a larger scope of work than RPA. RPA is generally meant to be used for defined, rule-based processes. Relatively, IPA is used for more complex operations that can benefit from the use of AI, machine learning, NLP, predictive analytics, and other technologies including RPA. IPA can also handle more types of data formats, as well as enable more types of intelligent decision-making. Both IPA and RPA are valuable and have their own best use cases. However, IPA first requires the foundation of RPA. In addition, an effective IPA strategy requires IT and data science teams to collaborate more in-depth than is necessary with RPA.

Summary

IPA is the product of combining AI and automation. It brings new abilities to your automation options, allowing the user to gather the benefits of automation in more areas of your daily workload.

Contact us at sales@brainbox.consultingfor more information and we would be happy to assist you with testing related services.

No-Code Automation is a new approach by creating automation tests which allows the user to test an application without writing a single piece code or script. The aim is to make the setup so easy to use so that automating a test scenario takes less time and require almost no coding efforts. No-Code platforms feature prebuilt drag and drop activities and tasks that facilitate integration at the business user level.

To get a brief idea on No-Code automation, please have a look at the article here:

What is No-Code Automation? | Brainbox

Why No-Code Automation has Taken Over?

The conventional IT automation tests require good knowledge about coding which is essential for the set up and maintenance of test suits. This prerequisite for the coding knowledge leads to lengthier learning curve for the user. In addition, the use of multiple coding languages adds extra level of complexity to this. An elegant solution to this problem is to use No-Code automation which is currently getting lot of attention due to its ease of use.  In No-Code automation, test tool uses flowcharts and building blocks to create test cases rather than codes. This enhances the versatility of No-Code automation tool as anyone in the QA team regardless of their programming knowledge can perform the tests. The visual interfaces with simple logic and drag and drop features rather than the codes makes it user-friendly.  The use of No-Code automation simplifies the maintenance of the automation tests as the modification of codes are not needed.

Code-less automation testing tools are a perfect solution for both automation and manual testers to speed up their work. These tools have taken over the market owing to their ease-of-use and speed. Code-less test automation is particularly useful when it comes to agile software development process.

Codeless Test Automation offers several benefits. Some of them include:

• Compatible with The Speed of The Development Cycle

Codeless test automation is designed with graphical UI workflows, all code is created to make automation easy to learn and implement. The testing process can start automating the use cases as soon as UI development is done without wasting time and going through difficult coding and frameworks. This makes it possible to match the speed of the development cycle with continuous integration and testing in Agile.

• Lower Maintenance Cost and Scale Automation

Automated flows can be united into reusable parts to use as sub-flows across testing use cases. If changes are made into re-used sub-flows, these changes will go into effect through all testing use cases holding the module. That means for most of the part, it is not necessary to correct the automation flows every time the system under test changes as codeless test automation depends on native identification of the objects of test use cases.

• Outspread the Scope of Automation

Codeless automation process helps to support various types of applications, such as web, desktop, and virtual applications. More specifically, this means that automated tests can include various interfaces across applications as part or beyond the project. With this flexibility, it is easy to measure the amount of automation from one to several applications, especially, those that include testing automation between projects.

• Effortless Document Processes and Changes

Codeless testing including visual description of a process and a documentation of how that process is executed decreases the testing efforts. Automated tests are documented with video and logs using advanced testing practices. All actions and events can be recorded in audit trails.

• User-Friendly

Code-based automation requires programming skills and hence can often be tricky and complicated to use. Code-less test automation, on the other hand, has an intuitive GUI, thereby making the process of test creation faster and simpler. Thus, even a manual tester can efficiently perform test automation.

• Integration Capabilities with a lot of Features

By integrating features such as test management and issue management code-less test automation can transform a testing platform into an entire test suite.

• Supports Agile

Regardless of their abilities and skills, all testers, developers or even SMEs and project managers can contribute to the testing process using code-less automation.

Summary:

No-code automation platforms have made it easier for non-technical people to create amazing and interactive apps, websites, and automation sequences. It saves time, energy, and cost. No-code automation platforms are highly useful for users with no technical know how on coding as well as to the experts with coding background due to its versatility.

Contact us at sales@brainbox.consulting for more information and we would be happy to assist you with testing related services.

Low-Code automation platform is a software development technique that require minimal to no coding knowledge to allow the user to automate processes in the application. Instead of using boundless coding language, Low-Code platforms use visual interfaces with simple logic and drag and drop features so that users can make use of them easily and quickly. But when performing complex or specific interactions, coding knowledge is necessary. These platforms reduce the amount of traditional hand coding and so increase business productivity as a result.

 Low Code Features

Low-Code Automation Tools

Creatio:

Creatio is a low-code CRM and Process Automation platform. It offers a CRM solution for sales, marketing, and service. Studio Creatio will help IT as well as non-IT staff to easily build enterprise-grade apps and processes. It can be deployed in the cloud as well as on-premises.

Appian:

Appian is an intelligent automation platform that help the organizations to build smart applications that will improve the business, customer engagement, and worker efficiency. It will ensure you about the security of your critical applications. The Appian low code development platform is a combination of intelligent automation and low-code development.

KiSSFLOW – BPM & Workflow Software:

KiSSFLOW- BPM & Workflow Software allows the user to create custom Apps and automate business processes. It provides more than 45 pre-installed apps to create the user’s own business applications. It provides the cloud-based solution which can be used by businesses of any size and from any industry.

monday.com:

monday.com provides a low code development platform that will helps the user to digitize processes and workflows. It will increase employees’ productivity and engagement. It helps you with fast building the functionality as per your needs. The user can be able to build any feature or functionality as per your requirement through this tool. The platform will let the user to automate the workflows without coding. It has features of interactive boards and custom forms that will provide business data in a quick and standardize way.

Quixy:

Quixy is a no-code BPM and Application Development Platform. It can be used by the business of any industry to build complex enterprise-grade applications. Quixy has dozens of pre-built solutions for various use cases such as CRM and Project & Task Management. Businesses can automate processes across departments using Quixy. It will help you to build complex custom enterprise software faster and with lower costs.

What does No-Code mean?

No-Code Automation is a new approach by creating automation tests which allows the user to test an application without writing a single piece code or script. The aim is to make the setup so easy to use so that automating a test scenario takes less time and require almost no coding efforts. No-Code platforms feature prebuilt drag and drop activities and tasks that facilitate integration at the business user level.

To get a brief idea on No-Code automation, please have a look at the article here:

What is No-Code Automation? | Brainbox

Difference between Low-Code and No-Code Automation

The main difference between Low-Code and No-Code automation are:

Programming Skills:

As their name suggests, No-Code automation platforms allow the user to test an application with out requiring any coding skills. So, anyone in the organization with a technical background can quickly create business applications. The downside is that if people are developing app without super vision or consideration, the results can lead to security concerns, compliance issues, integration problems, and poorly designed app that at best use more resources than necessary and at worst turn the users away.

On the other hand, Low-Code platforms allow the developers to go under the hood and hard core any part they might see it. They offer the automation faster, but only for the people that have real coding skills. For professional developers, the ability to work faster and more efficiently using a visual-based modeler, while also allowing them to code by hand as needed, means the perpetual backlog of needed applications shrinks, while IT’s business value grows.

Automation Design:

No-Code automation platforms allow the user to dominate the automation process design through simple drag and drop activities. Even though Low-Code platforms perform use a similar deployment model, there is ultimately a greater dependence on code for designing automated process.

Developer Dependency:

No-Code automation platforms allow absolute independence to the user to automate process since the user does not need any technical knowledge to operate the platform. On the other hand, Low-Code platforms give non-technical users to automate processes up to a certain point. Most probably, due to lack of coding skills, they need help to finalize the automation project. A developer or a technical person needs to be at hand to speed up the automation.

Summary:

Technically both Low-Code and No-Code platforms are holding same idea. The main difference between Low-Code and No-Code platforms as implied by their names, is that low-code platforms can still include coding in certain cases whereas no code platforms require absolutely no coding.

Contact us at sales@brainbox.consulting for more information and we would be happy to assist you with testing related services.

Automation Testing is a method of using an automation tool to execute the test case suite. The automation software can also enter test data into the System Under Test, compare expected and actual results and generate detailed test reports. Testing and Quality Assurance are the fundamental processes in software development. If the bugs are not detected early, it can get hard to fix resulting in the delay of the product delivery. So, testing needs to be proactive and this requires testing and re-testing whenever even the smallest change is made to the underlying code. As a software evolves, the need for repeated testing mounts. This is where Test Automation comes to the rescue. We can design and implement a test case once and run it whenever required. This saves time and money. It also vastly increases the test coverage and improves accuracy. 

No-Code Automation

Transitioning from manual to automated testing requires a change in strategy and resources. Since most of the automation test tools require the skill of coding, this transition can get difficult to the test resources and to the company. This is where the codeless test automation brings the value. With the same accuracy and reliability as any automation test tool, the codeless automation test tools help in achieving the desired results faster and without the need of coding.

No-Code Automation is a new approach by creating automation tests which allows you to test an application without writing a single piece code or script. The aim is to make the setup so easy to use so that automating a test scenario takes less time and require almost no coding efforts. For many tasks, especially in IT automation, lesser the code, easier it is. The user can achieve a faster time to results and greater simplicity just by using and reusing premade or preprogrammed blocks of activities.

There are multiple approaches behind no-code testing. The most prominent one involves recording manual tests and playing it back and creating structured test flow diagrams that are used to run tests. The record and play approach being the most popular one right now and especially favored by web-based products.

The idea behind the approach is that a tester manually performs a test, which the tool records click by click. The tool then creates scripts to automate the test itself. The testers can also edit the scripts, and the testing process to best suite their requirements.

How does No-Code Automation Work?

No-code testing tools provide a user-friendly GUI to the users and let the users record the test steps. This makes automating any test scenario very easy and less time consuming as you need not code from scratch for each test scenario. No-code automation functions very similarly to enterprise codeless platforms. Both take complex tasks traditionally achieved by coding and simplify them through automated code generation.

So how does no-code automation work? Even if you call it no code automation, it is not ‘codeless’. It just implies you need not write code. In fact, while you record the test steps, the automation tool generates the code in the background which required to drive test automation. So, the automation tools provide you with an abstraction layer, which translates simple user interactions to code. Thus, you can focus on creating test scenarios and evaluating the user experience of your website rather than struggling with the creation of the ‘chunks of code’ to test.

Some no-code automation still leverages record and playback, but unlike legacy tools that record “static” test cases, and which are prone to break upon any minor change in the app or element within the app, codeless tools are equipped with machine learning and AI capabilities which allow test reusability, provide stability, and call for near-zero test maintenance.

Newly developed no-code automation tools leverage a modern UI to record stable test scenarios with support for key features like data-driven testing, test assertions and more. In addition, they introduce the concept of a “self-healing” mechanism, which can dynamically detect UI changes in an app, and modify elements on the fly, without needing to change anything in the pre-recorded test.

Benefits of No-Code Automation

Code-less automation testing tools are a perfect solution for both automation and manual testers to speed up their work. These tools have taken over the market owing to their ease-of-use and speed. Code-less test automation is particularly useful when it comes to agile software development process.

No-Code test automation offers several benefits. Some of them are:

Available No-Code Automation Tools

There are a lot of changes in the testing world in the past few years- with new innovations on the technologies used. Automation tools have become smarter and even employ Artificial Intelligence for smart testing. There are many tools available in the market that aims to simplify the testing process and allow users to create test scenarios without any coding skills and still ensure maximum test coverage. Here is the list of the leading ‘No-Code Automation’ tools in the market.

Leapwork: Lepwork is a relatively new codeless automation tool which works well for non-developers, technical specialists, and business users alike. It can be used for automating various software technologies like SAP, Salesforce, mobile web pages, Citrix, desktop applications, and even custom-built systems.

TestingWhiz: TestingWhiz is a codeless automation testing tool for web, mobile, database, cloud, and web services testing. The tool makes test automation easy with its intuitive record/playback and drag and drop commands.

TestCraft: It is a selenium based codeless test automation platform ideal for regression and continuous testing. The tool comes with AI powered mechanisms for auto fix and maintenance of tests by automatically updating changes in the application during run time.

CloudQA: CloudQA is another popular automation tool which has an intuitive interface for codeless testing. It leverages record and playback tool and a feature rich SaaS platform. CloudQA has extended its capabilities to perform a wide range of tests for a single test case including synthetic monitoring, load testing and more.

EndTest: It is another codeless automated testing tool powered by machine learning. It comes packed with a ton of awesome features like self healing tests, generate random test data, advanced assertions, geolocation, screenshot comparison, live video, scheduler, Real Mobile devices, Notification and much more.

Browsee: Browsee is also a ‘codeless automation testing tool’. In Browsee, the tool identifies issues or bugs immediately as when a user encounters an issue. It monitors your real user experiences and reports to you whenever there is an issue. All you need to do is just add a JavaScript snippet on your web pages. The tool takes care of monitoring the user experience.

Testsigma: Testsigma is a AI-Driven SaaS Platform Test Automation Ecosystem for Web, Mobile Web, Android & iOS Apps, and API automated testing.

Ranorex: Ranorex Studio is a GUI test automation framework. Ranorex Studio supports development of automated test modules using standard programming languages such as C# and VB.NET.

Testim.io: Testim.io leverages machine learning for the authoring, execution and maintenance of automated test cases. It uses dynamic locators and learn with every execution. The outcome is super fast authoring and stable tests that learn, thus eliminating the need to continually maintain tests with every code change. 

Conclusion

No-code automation platforms have made it easier for non-technical people to create amazing and interactive apps, websites, and automation sequences. It saves time, energy, and cost. No-code automation platforms are highly useful for users with no technical know how on coding as well as to the experts with coding background due to its versatility.

Contact us at sales@brainbox.consulting for more information and we would be happy to assist you with testing related services.

The terms Test Automation and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are the two common terms within the field of software automation. They look identical as they both contain ‘Automation’ and offer the same features of reducing manual tasks. But these two are not the same as another. We will see in this article how they both are different even though they have some similarities. Let’s get started with their definitions:

What is Test Automation?

Test Automation is a method in software engineering that execute the test cases with the help of an automation tool. It further compares the actual results with the predicted ones. Test Automation helps developers and testers save time and increase test coverage by automating repetitive test cases. Test teams can reduce manual test efforts and eliminate bottlenecks. It is an important stage of a development process that is used to add additional testing that may be difficult to perform manually.

Advantages of Test Automation

Figure 1: Advantages of Test Automation

 What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

Robotic Process Automation or RPA is a term for a piece of software, or a ‘robot’, which carries out tasks and activities within systems, or applications, in the same way a human would. The term “Robotic Process Automation” imply visions of physical robots wandering around offices performing human tasks, the term really means automation of service tasks that were previously performed by humans. RPA is a practice of automating the business processes using software robots.

To get a brief idea on RPA and RPA tools, have a look at the article https://www.brainbox.consulting/talent/blogs-news/software-testing-blog/robotic-process-automation/ .

Advantages of RPA

Figure 2: Advantages of Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Difference between Test Automation and RPA

Now that we have looked at what is Test Automation and RPA, it is possible to think that they both are one and the same. Organizations use them to automate tasks, save costs and increase efficiency. Specially UI test automation looks very similar to RPA as both include automation of user interactions. But, however similar they might look, Test Automation and Robotic Process Automation are not the same. Let us see in this section how test automation and RPA are different.

1. Purpose

Test automation is solely used for testing. Its main purpose is to check and verify if a software or hardware is working as it is intended to and to make sure there are no bugs and failures in an application’s operation.

Whereas RPA is not used for testing. It is used to automate business processes and does not include any testing. Its purpose is to improve the efficiency of processes in an organization and making it easier by automating repetitive business processes.

2. Scope

One of the main differences between Test Automation and RPA is the System under Test (SUT). Test automation can be applied only to a single software, application or product and its features.

RPA can be applied to the product as well as other business processes. RPA flows can run through different applications simultaneously.

3. Environments

Test automation is implemented across different environments (i.e., QA, Production, Performance, UAT).

RPA only needs a single production environment.

4. Technology involved

Test automation can execute only what is coded in it. It just follows what it is instructed to do to test the System Under Test and does not do anything more.

Recent RPA tools use Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology that learn from human interaction with applications and imitate the same, improving the efficiency of process by learning from it.

5. Domain knowledge and process knowledge

While performing Test Automation, it is very important for testers to have domain knowledge of application or System Under Test. This is needed to define efficient test scenarios and create test cases that can then be automated.

For Robotic Process Automation, it is important to have knowledge of the business processes involved. To know how the business processes are linked and how they interact with each other is important to automate the processes. However, RPA do not need in-depth knowledge of how the applications involved work internally.

6. Programming knowledge

Traditional test automation requires knowledge of at least one programming language to automate test cases. Although now, there is more use of codeless and low code automation tools in the market, there is still coding involved in most of the automation tools.

RPA tools mostly use tools that have drag and drop features which are intuitive in nature. RPA allows user to automate processes through visual interface and it then generates the code accordingly. This makes programming knowledge not necessary to automate using RPA.

7. Tools used

It may seem like we can use Test Automation tools for RPA as well. But as we saw in earlier points, even though they may seem similar, there are different tools available for Test Automation and RPA.

RPA tools use intuitive automation that takes user inputs through visual interface. UiPath and iRPA of SAP are two examples of RPA tools. It is not possible to automate business processes using Selenium.

There are multiple tools for test automation depending on what you are testing. Selenium is an important tool to test web applications.

Summary

As we have seen in the article, Robotic Process Automation does look a lot like Test Automation. Yet they are not the same. The main difference being RPA is used to automate business processes and Test Automation is used to test an application, software, or a product. They both hold their own ground in their respective fields. The similarity is, both Test Automation and RPA help in increasing efficiency for an organization.

Contact us at sales@brainbox.consulting for more information and we would be happy to assist you with testing related services.

Selenium is a testing tool that is widely used to test web applications. It provides with lot of in built functionalities that can be used readily to automate a web application, no matter how complex the UI is. Selenium provides different classes that contains multiple methods which we can use to perform different operations on a web application. This makes testers life easier and allows them to test faster and more efficiently without having to write lengths of code.

‘Actions’ class is one such component of Selenium that provides multiple methods to perform different actions in the web browser. Read on to know more about it.

What is Actions class in Selenium

Automating a web application involves clicking of buttons, enter text in a text field and many such actions. These interactions are done through keyboard and mouse. Such interactions include drag and drop, clicking on multiple elements using control key. This is where Actions class can be used. Actions class provides methods that can used to perform keyboard and mouse actions in a web application.

Actions class is defined and invoked using the following syntax:

Actions action = new Actions(driver);

action.moveToElement(element).click().perform();

In python, the class used to perform complext keyboard and mouse actions is ‘ActionChains’.

Methods of Actions Class / Actions Facilitated by Actions class

Action class is used to perform keyboard and mouse events in a web application. It provides with multiple methods that help to achieve this.

Some of the actions that can be performed using Actions class are as below.

Mouse Actions:

• doubleClick(): Performs double click on the element
• clickAndHold(): Performs long click on the mouse without releasing it
• dragAndDrop(): Drags the element from one point and drops to another
• moveToElement(): Shifts the mouse pointer to the center of the element
• contextClick(): Performs right-click on the mouse

Keyboard Actions:

• sendKeys(): Sends a series of keys to the element
• keyUp(): Performs key release
• keyDown(): Performs keypress without release

Difference between Action class and Actions interface

Actions is a class that is based on a builder design pattern.  This is a user-facing API for emulating complex user gestures.

Whereas Action is an Interface which represents a single user-interaction action. It contains one of the most widely used methods perform().

How to use Action class?

Now we have seen what is Actions class. Let us see how it can be implemented to test web applications.

Step 1: First, we have to import the package org.openqa.selenium.interactions.Actions.

Step 2: To use the methods provided by the Actions class, we need to create an object of this class and pass the WebDriver as an argument.

// instantiate the WebDriver

WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

// create an object of the Actions class

Actions act = new Actions(driver);

Step 3: The object created can now be used to perform any actions. You can see various actions that are provided by this class once you create an object.

An example of using Actions Class method

sendKeys()

Using the Actions class in Selenium, the user can implement the sendKeys() method to type specific values in the application. Below is a simple code which is used to search a product in a search engine by passing the product’s name in the search box.

That is how to use the actions class in Selenium with sendKeys() method. The build() method generates a composite action containing all actions which are ready to be performed. The perform() method is used to perform the series of actions that are defined.

Summary

The Selenium Actions class is useful for performing actions on any element on the screen by specifying x and y coordinates. It is possible to locate more than one web element using the Actions class.  This article simplifies the process so that testers know how to simulate common user actions on websites and applications. This lets them monitor software behavior in the real world so that they can verify and optimize user experience for its best possible state.

Contact us at sales@brainbox.consulting for more information and we would be happy to assist you with testing related services.

Robotic Process Automation is one of the most recent developments that is increasingly being adopted in Business Process Management. Though it seems like a modern technology, robotic process automation has been around for few years now. Take for example, inbound call centres have been using Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRS) for years.

SAP has also developed a Business Process Management tool called SAP intelligent RPA, which combines both RPA and machine learning technologies. Read on to get insight on the first impression of the SAP iRPA tool article.

What is RPA?

Before going to SAP Intelligent RPA, let us have a brief look into what is RPA. Robotic Process Automation or RPA is a term for a piece of software, or a ‘robot’, which carries out tasks and activities within systems, or applications, in the same way a human would. The term “Robotic Process Automation” imply visions of physical robots wandering around offices performing human tasks, the term really means automation of service tasks that were previously performed by humans. For business processes, the term RPA refers to configuring a software to perform tasks which were previously carried by people (for instance, transferring data from multiple input sources like email and spreadsheets to systems of record like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems).

SAP Intelligent RPA

SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation is a complete automation suite where software robots are designed to mimic humans by replacing manual clicks, interpreting text-heavy communications, or making process suggestions to end users for definable and repeatable business processes.

Components of SAP Intelligent RPA

There are mainly 3 components of SAP Intelligent RPA.

Desktop Agent: 

Desktop agent is the engine to be executed on the user desktop or on the server either Attended or Unattended bots.

There are two ways to consider the assistance depends on what needs to be automated and how should be automated.

Attended bot (digital assistant): It is deployed on user workstation and launched by user. Robots are interacting with the user in the workstation to ease manual processes and simplify them and increase the user performance. Some areas of the process can be automated, but at the end user is in control.

Unattended bot (digital worker): It is deployed on server. When a large set of tasks which does not need human interaction, then we can use unattended bot. It need only one human to supervise to execute the process of all the bots then the robots will work autonomously. The goal is to skip manual processes and can be automate the whole process.

Cloud Factory:

Cloud factory is responsible for orchestration and monitoring process automation. It is a cloud-based solution powered by SAP cloud platform and allows to launch though that it can be triggered by the user or scheduled on the server. No deployment is required for cloud factory. It manages environments, hierarchies, and script packages.

Desktop Studio:

Desktop studio is a complete and powerful IDE which offers the complete automation development environment including the classic faces of IT development with advanced support functions. It allows the user to build the process automation. The user only must deploy the studio on the developer’s workstation.

Both desktop agent and desktop studio are connected to the cloud factory.

Source

First Impression of the Tool

Tool setup:

Setting up of the SAP Intelligent RPA tool is straight forward. SAP provides a detailed instruction of how to proceed with the installation, which is easy to follow.

Creating Bots:

The desktop studio has 4 components, Applications, Workflows, Scripts and UI Designer.

Applications tab helps you to capture and application and its pages. All the elements on that page will also be captured. Then you can decide what operation you want to perform on the page. It is very helpful for the user that they can capture a whole page instead on each element separately and choose the operations they want to do later. This can always be changed.

Workflow is where the sequence of execution is determined. There are multiple activities available to perform actions like starting and closing an application, message boxes, SAP APIs, Web Services etc. You can add the captured web pages according to their sequence to follow an execution path. Creating workflows is easy and since all the components are readily available, the process is faster.

After creating a workflow, you must build the workflow created. This is when the script is generated according to the workflow created. If the workflow has some issues, the debug process will throw you errors. You can analyze the errors and make changes to your workflow.

After building successfully, debug the code. This will start the execution of the process. An execution window opens, and you can see what is happening during execution. With the help of the agent, the automated process will now run. It is also possible to export the project, upload into the cloud factory and schedule when the bots need to be run.

Business Value of SAP Intelligent RPA

• Improve operations

SAP Intelligent RPA can remove manual, tedious and error prone tasks from the process so that the people can focuses on high value assignments and transformational activities. The user can build efficient bots using SAP Intelligent RPA which can multitask and do parallel processing of various set of tasks with out disturbing humans and interfere only when needed. It prevents long and expensive development and focus on high value tasks creativity.

• Reduce cycle times

SAP Intelligent RPA ensures that the user do not get trapped into long and expensive development process. By reducing the cycle times, it can bring insubstantial speed and reliability in the process execution cycle, which can reduce overall cycle times for completing various set of tasks which otherwise user needs to manually ensure. Cycle time reduction can be immediately producing considerable cost savings and results a quick return investment. It will improve overall process efficiency and reduce/cut process execution time.

• Increase compliance and service quality

The use of SAP Intelligent RPA will improve to increase service quality. It reduces human errors and gain speed and efficiency with bots running all the time. However, human can no focus on valuable error handling, taking care of the customers. iRPA helps the user to recompile well documented audit trails provide the user even clear visibility what bots did where they succeeded, or they failed etc. The detailed process execution logs introduce validations and auto reporting.

• Gateway to AI

SAP Intelligent RPA acting as a gateway to artificial intelligence. SAP iRPA is about setting a right stage for AI as bot platform and create a lot of digital history on process execution. This can allow the application of AI models on the bot execution data to teach the bots for handling unstructured data learning through exception, handling experiences and eventually even heal them themselves in case of exceptional failures. Machine learning services here can participate in the process exceution.by digitally reading or interpreting texts or images or documents and feeding those inputs so that the bots can continue to execute.

Summary

SAP iRPA is a robust tool that combines the technologies of both RPA and machine learning. The tool is intuitive and once you get a hang of it, it gets easier and faster to create bots to automate business processes.

Contact us at sales@brainbox.consulting for more information and we would be happy to assist you with testing related services.

The term “Automation” is everywhere. Automation focuses on automating repetitive tasks and enhance efficiency. This is true for Testing as well. Test automation has been in the forefront, which has resulted in more optimum use of test resources with increased efficiency in test results and saved time, allowing to do more testing.

There are multiple tools available today to perform test automation and Selenium is one of them. Selenium has become the go to tool to automate web application testing. Its versatility makes it popular among test engineers.

In this article, we will see what are the best practices that we can adopt while using selenium as test automation tool.

Selenium Test Automation

The Selenium is an open source test framework for automating interactions with the browser. Because of its powerful open source features and standard adoption across many browsers, Selenium has become the most popular web testing framework in the world. User can run the automated testing scripts in a variety of languages (Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, C#, NodeJS, etc.) against local browsers, a lab of browsers and devices using Selenium Grid or a device cloud like what Cross browser testing provides.

Selenium-based tests are ideal for testing different types and versions of web browsers. Selenium is a suite of Selenium tools used for testing. It contains Selenium IDE, Selenium RC, Selenium Web driver, and Selenium Grid. It is used for automating web interactions and regression testing and has recording and playback features. User also can export the scripts that are recorded to other languages including Java, C#, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and PHP.

Best Practices of Selenium Automation Testing

Selenium is already a robust tool that can be used for web application testing. By following certain best practices, we can make sure to have tests that are more flexible and efficient. Read on to know some of the best practices that we can follow.

• Use the Right Locators

One of the process which is at the heart of selenium web application testing is interacting with the browser. It should let you navigate through the website, click, type and perform different operations on the website. This can be done using several types of locators,

• • • Class
    • ID
    • Link Text
    • Partial Link Text
    • Tag Name
    • XPath

Selecting the right locator to find elements on the website can make or break your tests. If you use a locator that will break on slightest UI change will make your tests brittle. For example, locators like link text can change all the time and may not work every time. Whereas unique identifiers like class and ID are less likely to change and will make the tests robust.

• Use Page Object Model

Page Object Model (POM) is a popular design pattern used in selenium automation testing. This model improves Selenium test maintenance and reduces code duplication. Page Object Model pattern can be used in any framework. Selenium testing uses the methods from the POM whenever an interaction is required with the User Interface (UI). So, if the UI changes, the tests do not need to change.

The page object model has two core advantages:

• • • There is clean separation between test code and page specific code such as locators and layout.
    • There is single repository for the services or operations offered by the page rather than having these services scattered throughout the tests.

• Use Selenium Wait Commands Instead of Thread.sleep()

It is quite often that the web application takes some time to load due to the network speed, server issues or various other reasons. To tackle this, user need to pause the scripts to wait for all the elements to load. This is a good way to ensure that all web elements are there while you run your tests on them. The clear understanding of implicit and explicit wait will help a lot.

Wait

• • • Explicit – Wait till a certain condition occurs without continuing in the code.
    • Implicit – WebDriver is instructed to poll the DOM till the search for an element is completed. The time is set to 0 by default.

Sleep

• • • sleep() waiting happens for the seconds specified within the brackets irrespective of the readiness of the working page.

‘Wait’ is better than ‘sleep’, because sleep waits until the defined time even after the task is completed. But wait knows how long to wait and is smart enough to start when the action is completed. Sleep will slow down the test, while wait does not affect the test time.

• Use Data-Driven Testing for Parameterization

A web application should be tested against different combinations of browsers, devices, and OS combinations. Hard coding of test values in test automation scripts is not a scalable solution as it would lead to unnecessary bloatware and possible repetition of test code.

A better solution is using parameterization for achieving data-driven automation testing with Selenium. Parameterization helps in executing test cases against different input combinations. More extensive the data set, the better is the test coverage. This, in turn, helps in improving product quality and implementing good Selenium test practices.

• Use Assert and Verify in Appropriate Scenarios

There are several cases in automation testing with Selenium, where the user would want to halt the test execution on encountering a hard error. For example, you are using Selenium to automate testing of the website login page, but the web locator being used for locating the sign-in box is not correct. In this case, assert should be issued as the remaining tests will falter out as they are dependent on the sign-in page.

Asserts should only be used when you want to halt the test execution in case of a hard failure. If the assert condition is false, execution stops, and further tests will not be executed. On the other hand, verify should be used where the criticality of the error is low, and you still want to proceed with test execution irrespective of the status of Verify condition.

• Don’t Depend on a Specific Driver

Never depend on one driver implementation. Understand that the drivers are not instantaneous in different browsers. That is, there won’t necessarily be an IE driver, Firefox driver, etc. The thing to keep in mind about Selenium test automation is the fact that the drivers are not interchangeable, so there can be issues even if you use the right driver for the browser, which is something you really want to cover in a meaningful manner.

What you can do is to go with all kinds of Parameter notes to manage a variety of browser types. This will make it easier to prepare for execution simultaneously and that’s something you want to consider.

• Avoid Code Duplication (or Wrap Selenium Calls)

One of the most common Selenium best practices for Selenium test automation is avoiding unnecessary duplication of code. You might be using different web locators such as XPath, ID, etc. for accessing the web elements present on the web page. The code that is frequently used in the implementation should be created as a separate API, so that code duplication is minimal.

Avoiding duplication also helps in the reduction of code size and improves the maintainability of the test code. Wrapping Selenium calls is one of the Selenium best practices that can significantly impact maintaining a complex test suite or test code.

• Leverage Parallel Testing in Selenium

A primary factor for Selenium’s popularity is its support for parallel testing. Almost all popular test frameworks such as PyTest, PyUnit, TestNG, Cucumber, etc. provide features for executing tests in parallel on a Selenium Grid. Parallel testing in Selenium lets the user to execute the same tests simultaneously on different environments such as a combination of browsers, platforms, and device emulators. Using Selenium, it is recommended to enable parallel testing in the implementation as it reduces the test execution time by a significant margin.

At Brainbox, we have developed a Test Automation Framework for end to end application testing of web and mobile android platforms. We have followed all the above mentioned best practices for Selenium automation testing to make the framework robust, flexible and reliable.

To know more about the Brainbox framework, you can refer here https://www.brainbox.consulting/talent/blogs-news/software-testing-blog/brainbox-test-automation-framework/.

Summary

Selenium allows you to create a stable, true, and reliable automation process if you use it to its full capability. There’s a lot that can be done to improve test automation efforts and these practices would certainly help to improve. Finding bugs early in the development, that can-do wonders while performing test automation. Also, it’s always to play smart and think over the test design and strategy before you start writing Selenium test automation scripts.

Contact us at sales@brainbox.consulting for more information and we would be happy to assist you with testing related services.

Selenium is the leading open source solution for web test automation. As it is only a driver, it does not have any built-in features for test reporting. Test reporting being a crucial element of test automation framework, the lack of this key functionality will hinder the option of tracking the information and communication with others on the team. Even though, Selenium doesn’t support report generation, but it’s easy enough to do with the right tools. As Selenium provides client APIs for multiple languages such as Java, C#, Python, Ruby, and many more, it is essential to choose the best reporting tool for Selenium that meets the preferred programming language requirements and also fulfills your criteria. Selenium test result reports should carry all the relevant information so that the team members and managers can measure the reports’ progress.

Selenium can be seen using different Selenium reporting tools. Some of the Selenium reporting tools are as follows.

1. TestNG

TestNG is a popular open source unit testing framework inspired by JUnit and NUnit. It comes with a library with a default reporting feature that can be used to generate test reports and can be stored in a designated folder. Apart from the basic level reports, it also provides an option to generate detailed reports. The file index.html that is generated without any manual involvement carries the entire report, along with information on errors, tests executed, the status of test scenarios, and more. When TestNG is used with IDE’s like Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA, TestNG can create emailable-report.html that shows the scores of each test scenario that can be embedded and shared without any hassle.

 Pros:

• • No additional installation needed, as the reporting feature comes default with the TestNG framework
  • Creates HTML reports
  • Best reporting tool for Selenium and Java combination and easy to use with CI/CD tool like Jenkins, GitLab CI, and more

Cons:

• • Supports only Java
  • Only available with TestNG framework
  • Creates only local HTML reports

2. Allure

Allure is an open-source framework that is designed for creating test execution reports that are easy to understand. It is lightweight and allows the user to add parameters, steps, and attachments. Allure is based on standard xUnit results, to which it adds some supplementary data. Report generation in Allure occurs in two steps. Allure provides adapters for widely used test frameworks for Ruby, Python, Scala, Java, PHP, and C#.

Pros:

• • It has multiple adapters for many testing frameworks
  • Generates detailed test reports that give a clear visualization of summary, defects, behaviors (for BDD tests), graphs, and timelines
  • Usable as an on-premises solution
  • Easy to integrate with popular CI/CD tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, etc.
  • Support for taking screenshots, a feature that helps in UI testing
  • Detailed documentation and exhaustive examples with different programming languages
  • Allure Plugin System provides a greater level of flexibility to the representation of reports
  • Active community on GitHub and platforms like Stack Overflow

Cons:

• • Plugin solution that does not have its own database, needs to be integrated with Jenkin/TeamCity/Bamboo to turn in to collaborative report

3. Junit

JUnit provides an option as one of the Selenium reporting tools for Java and Selenium. The implementation under @BeforeClass annotation is run before starting any annotation in the class. Hence, pre-execution tasks like opening the HTML report, adding predefined information, and more can be under the @BeforeClass annotation. The implementation under @AfterClass annotation is run once all the tests have been executed. Post execution tasks like adding test case results and closing reports can be under the @AfterClass annotation. Like TestNG, JUnit also gives Selenium test result reports in a very simple and understandable format.

 Pros:

• • It is a popular open-source unit testing tool that is used by Java developers, so JUnit’s reporting feature automatically becomes one of the best reporting tools for Selenium and Java
  • The reporting functionality is available by default with the JUnit framework.
  • It creates easily understandable local HTML reports

Cons:

• • Works only with Java and Junit
  • Required code implementation to make it work
  • Local reports only

4. Extend Reports

Extent Reports is an open-source reporting library used in selenium test automation. Extent reports become the first choice of Selenium Automation Testers, even though Selenium comes with inbuilt reports using frameworks like JUnit and TestNG. The major difference between the reports provided by JUnit and Extent library is the readability and clarity of information that is supplemented with pie charts and other visual elements. The Extent Reports Library has provision to add logs, events, screenshots, devices, tags, authors, or any other information that can enhance the report’s information.

Pros:

• • Extent reports are more customizable than others
  • Extent API can produce more interactive reports, a dashboard view, graphical view, capture screenshots at every test step, and e-mailable reports
  • It can be easily integrated with frameworks like JUnit, NUnit, & TestNG
  • It displays the time taken for test case execution
  • Good documentation

Cons:

• • The community plan does not include CI/CD integration
  • Support only Java and C#
  • The community plan has a limited dashboard that does not include: Errors able, Tags table, Author filter, Device filter

5. ReportNG

ReportNG is a simple HTML reporting plugin that is developed for the TestNG framework. It can be used in place of the default TestNG HTML report. ReportNG uses a color-coding mechanism in the test reports, making the report easy to understand at a single glance. ReportNG generates 100% valid XHTML 1.0 files. The output can be customized by over-riding the default stylesheet with your own CSS file.

 Pros:

• • More detailed reporting mechanism than the default HTML reports provided by TestNG framework
  • Ease to customize the look and feel using a user-defined CSS file
  • Easy to integrate with CI/CD tool like Jenkins
  • Inclusion of a second reporter that produces JUnit format XML output from version 0.9.0

Cons:

• • Only available for the TestNG framework

 Use case

At Brainbox, we have developed a Test Automation Framework for end to end application testing of web and mobile android platforms. You can find the details about the framework here https://www.brainbox.consulting/talent/blogs-news/software-testing-blog/brainbox-test-automation-framework/.

In our test automation framework, we included Allure because of its advantages such as open source and greater level of flexibility to the representation of reports. Besides this, the report generated in Allure give a clear visualization of summary, defects, behaviors, graphs, and timelines. Allure also support taking screenshots and can be easily integrated with Jenkins, GitLab etc.

A picture representation of some features embedded in our systems is given below.

Conclusion

In Selenium’s best reporting tools some of them are language-specific, whereas some are specific to the CI/CD tool. The usage of the ideal Selenium reporting tools is essential for any project that involves Selenium automation testing. It helps track the progress of the testing activity and helps in communicating the status to the relevant stakeholders of the project.

Contact us at sales@brainbox.consulting for more information and we would be happy to assist you with testing related services.

Selenium Grid is a feature in selenium that allows you run test cases in different machines across different platforms. It also makes it easy to run tests in parallel on multiple machines. This is done by routing commands to remote web browser instances, where one server acts as the hub. This hub routes test commands that are in JSON format to multiple registered Grid nodes.

Read on further to know more about selenium grid in this article.

What is Selenium?

Before we dig deeper into the benefits of using Selenium Grid for Selenium test automation, we must have a look at the basics of Selenium. Selenium is an open-source test framework that is used to automate the actions of the product under test. To put it plainly, Selenium automates a web browser to behave like a user while allowing you to write test scripts in different programming languages including Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, C#, NodeJS, etc. Selenium-based tests are ideal for testing different types and versions of web browsers.

There are 4 components of the Selenium project.

1. Selenium RC
2. Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
3. Selenium Grid
4. Selenium WebDriver

Selenium WebDriver is the core component of the Selenium framework as it enables the interfacing of the test code with the elements of the web page under test. It communicates directly with a web browser and has a browser-specific application. On the other hand, Selenium IDE or Selenium Integrated Development Environment is a plugin that allows you to record test scripts and playback the existing ones.  Selenium RC is a testing framework that enables a QA or a developer to write test cases in any programming language to automate UI tests for web applications against any HTTP website.

What is Selenium Grid?

Selenium Grid is a testing tool (which is a part of the Selenium Suite) that is based on the ‘client-server’ architecture. In Selenium Grid terminology, Client machine is termed as ‘Hub’ and server(s) are termed as ‘Nodes’.

Selenium Grid setup allows you to execute cross browser testing through a variety of different machines across different browsers (as well as different versions of browsers) & different operating systems. Hence, it brings the require amount of ‘parallelism’ & ‘distribution’ to your test execution environment.

A Selenium Grid setup can have only one Hub and ‘n’ number of nodes. The primary job of the ‘hub machine’ is to distribute the test case supplied to the ‘node machine’ which matches the capabilities/requirements required for executing the test case for performing cross browser testing.

Primary Components of the Selenium Grid Setup

There are mainly 2 components in Selenium Grid setup,

1. Hub: Hub acts as a master in Selenium Grid. There will be a single hub in the grid which will know the configuration of each registered node. When specific test requirements are given to the hub, then hub searches for the node which matches the test requirements. If hub founds a node which matches the test requirements, then test will be executed on that node machine. If node with required specifications is not found, then hub returns an error.
2. Node: Node acts as slave in Selenium Grid. There can be one or more nodes present in the Grid. Node machines can have different configuration like OS, different versions of browsers etc.… It is not mandatory for a node to have same configuration as that of hub machine. Nodes are dependent on Hub.

 When to use Selenium Grid?

Selenium Grid can be used in the following circumstances:

1. To run tests on multiple browsers and their versions, different devices, and operating systems
2. To reduce the time that a test suite takes to complete a test

Selenium Grid improves the turnaround time of tests especially when the test suite is large. It offers flexibility and widens the coverage of tests.

 How Selenium Grid works

A Selenium Grid setup can have only one Hub and ‘n’ number of nodes. The primary job of the ‘hub machine’ is to distribute the test case supplied to the ‘node machine’ which matches the capabilities/requirements required for executing the test case for performing cross browser testing.

For example, you can set up a Selenium Grid with a hub and two nodes, where the node configuration is as below:

Node 1 – Windows 10, Chrome

Node 2 – Windows 10, Firefox

If there is a test case that has the Desired Capabilities requirement as Windows 10 + Chrome, the hub first receives the request for this requirement. By looking at the requirement, it diverts the execution request to Node 1.

In case you want to use the Selenium WebDriver to execute tests on a separate machine, you must use Remote WebDriver interface. Since the tests (in normal scenarios) must be executed on a different machine, RemoteWebDriver is based on the traditional ‘Client-Server’ model.

Use case

At Brainbox, we have developed a Test Automation Framework for end to end application testing of web and mobile android platforms. You can find the details about the framework here https://www.brainbox.consulting/talent/blogs-news/software-testing-blog/brainbox-test-automation-framework/.

Brainbox Test Automation Framework Architecture

This framework uses a keyword driven approach (similar to BDD) where the test cases and test steps can be defined via simple English specified in an excel document. When there are any issues in test cases or in test steps, error recovery block will detect the defects. The next layer, Application and Business specific layer consists of business specific modules such as login function of a website. The subsequent layer contains configuration files, verifications, and UI objects. When a test fails, the Test exception handling module will handle the failure. The same layer also contains test logging and reporting session. Test automation-Tool & Runner layer contains tools like Selenium, Python and Appium Studio for test automation.  Automation test agent/Drivers layer connects Selenium with browsers and Appium with the device. The bottom layer (application under test) gives users flexibility to choose the test cases and the necessary steps. This framework also supports automation of hybrid test scenarios consisting test steps and verification across applications on Web and Mobile platform. It supports testing of web applications on different browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Internet Explorer.  Selenium grid is used in this framework to run multiple tests parallelly. The hub and multiple nodes are created for different browsers. The primary job of the hub machine is to distribute the test case supplied to the node machine. When a user performs a test, it goes through the hub and depending on the browser the tests will be executed.

Advantages of using Selenium Grid for Automated Browser Testing

1. Extensive language support
2. Dedicated framework support
3. Multi-browser support
4. Multi- operating system support
5. Free and open source
6. Parallel test execution (local and cloud based)
7. Powerful reporting for test progress tracking
8. Integration with CI/CD pipeline
9. Android and iOS mobile apps testing
10. Code reusability for improved maintenance
11. Vibrant developer and support community

Summary

Selenium Grid offers the flexibility of running test cases across multiple browsers, browser versions and machines. Testers can ensure cross platform compatibility of tests by using Selenium Grid.

Contact us at sales@brainbox.consulting for more information and we would be happy to assist you with testing related services.