Towards a Method for Automated Testing in Robotic Process Automation Projects

Abstract

The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) paradigm has received increasing attention in recent years. It enables task automation by software components which interact with user interfaces in a similar way to that of humans. An RPA project follows a similar lifecycle as a software project. However, in certain contexts (e.g., business process outsourcing, BPO), a testing environment is not always available. Thus, deploying the robots in the production environment entails high risk. To mitigate this risk, an innovative approach to automatically generate a testing environment and a test case for an RPA project are described. The activities of the humans whose processes are to be robotized are monitorized and an UI log (i.e., a sequence of screen captures, mouse and key actions) is confirmed. On the one hand, the test environment is generated as a fake application, which mimics the real enviroment by leveraging the UI log information. To this end, the control flow of the application is governed by an invisible control layer which decides which image to show depending on the interface actions that it receives. On the other hand, the test case checks whether the robot can reproduce the behaviour of the UI log. A prototype has been constructed and tested in a controlled scenario. Promising results have been obtained and a number of limitations to be addressed have been identified such that it may be applied in more realistic domains.

Robotic Process Automation in the Automotive Industry - Lessons Learned from an Exploratory Case Study

“…The aim of the study presented in this paper is to explore RPA use cases in the automotive industry along the software lifecycle model [13]. Furthermore, the challenges to be tackled for each lifecycle stage are derived [4,7]:…”

“…Scientifically, RPA has been investigated in various directions, e.g., systematic literature reviews [6,17], case studies in areas like shared services [10,22] and telecommunications [16,23], methods fostering RPA implementation [4,7], and attempts to quantify RPA effects [20]. However, there exists little research on introducing RPA in the automotive industry.…”

Using Blockchain to Improve Collaborative Business Process Management: Systematic Literature Review

“…Specially, we will research model-driven mechanisms to facilitate the integration between blockchain technology and collaborative process management. The use of model-driven engineering paradigm has obtained satisfactory results in other areas [66][67][68] and it could be interesting its application in this topic to reduce costs and improve quality. For example, we are exploring model-driven early testing techniques to approve and validate smart contracts that are tied to business rules on critical processes.…”

Design and implementation of script module with recording and playback function in CAE software

“…Advanced users of CAE software can also quickly customize automation tasks by writing new scripts or modifying recorded scripts, and package those tasks as script files to achieve secondary development. The recording and playback function in CAE software is also referred to as task automation [1][2][3] sometimes.…”