It is always the end of a process that gets squeezed when a project timeline runs over. Thorough QA testing is too often the sacrificial lamb to make a production deadline. But cutting corners here can create huge costs downstream in break fix, down time, and business disruptions. The WonderBotz automation services team is here to help. Automation Testing as a Service employs test robots to perform RPA testing of your Intelligent Automations.
How to build automation test cases
Comprehensive RPA testing should include three main points of focus:
- The ‘happy path,’ where everything happens as expected in the most likely scenarios
- Branching paths are less common variations of a process
- Error handling when the data or systems do not perform as expected
The first area of focus is testing to ensure that the automation is interacting properly with the application (i.e., reading, writing and navigating correctly), ensuring that all the basic functionalities are being performed smoothly and the outcomes are being logged correctly.
Each path/branch of a process identified during the design phase must be captured and included in testing. Infrequent or outlying cases are the first to be overlooked or presumed to function properly when timelines get tight. However, those cases should be put through testing with as much rigor as any other case. Since they often have less documentation, they require more time to diagnose and resolve if they break later.
In addition to testing cases that are completed successfully, each exception type should also be tested to ensure that they are caught and handled properly. Error test cases should include:
- System Unavailable Exceptions: These occur when systems are down or unavailable
- Business Referral Exceptions: These are driven by business rules (e.g., data isn’t formatted correctly or is missing) and result in a hand-off to a human or an alert
- System Exceptions: These are triggered when the application is not behaving as expected (e.g., uncommon pop-up screens)
When testing your solutions’ error handling, you want to validate not only that the errors are caught, but also that they are handled according to the situation.
Talk to a member of our team about how we can support your automation department with more complete, faster, and less expensive automation testing.
What to consider when deciding if you should keep QA testing in house
There are several factors to consider when deciding if you should perform automation testing in-house. Using your in-house developers for testing and production support (the department that is responsible for fixing the errors not caught during testing) distracts them from creating new value. Getting pulled away from a current build to fix a problem can be a major cause of delays in the production timeline.
When deciding if you should keep testing in house or outsource you should consider:
- How long it will take to build test cases for all paths/branches, including errors
- How many resources are available and their bandwidth
- The amount of time the provisioning of bots will take
Ideally, preparing for testing happens concurrent to development with the goal that test cases/data are ready when development is compete. It is critical that time has been allocated for resources to prepare test cases/data that accurately represent what will be processed in the real world. After considering the above factors, you should calculate backwards from the expected delivery date to derive when to start preparing for testing.
Benefits of outsourcing RPA Testing
The WonderBotz testing team takes the weight off your developers and IT team.
We will work with your development team to design the test cases for new automations and use test bots to do the work. They will execute the regression testing in a secure QA environment.
By using automation to test your automations, we can run more tests in less time and make sure all paths/branches and error handling cases are fully addressed. We ensure industry best practices are being followed, and RPA testing code is reusable. Not to mention, if we uncover gaps, we can help you utilize intelligent automation to close them.
Free your developers to focus on new automations, decrease testing and maintenance costs, and safeguard against business interruptions with WonderBotz Testing as a Service.