As per recent research by MarketsandMarkets, Enterprise Software Testing and the Global Enterprise Test Automation Services market size is expected to grow from USD 12.6 billion in 2021 to USD 28.8 billion by 2024. Even when the investment is hefty, with the right amount of efforts organizations are dicey about the delivered results. What if this ongoing effort can be eliminated? This is where Robotic Process Automation (RPA) comes into play to aid testing processes.
RPA tools can make Testing and QA Services 80% more efficient and productive and help leverage more features to the market at a faster pace. Using RPA solutions, software’s can bring tremendous simplicity for building bots at high speed and deploying them with the least number of technical skills. Hence, there is a strong push from the big enterprises from all domains to shift from manual testing to intelligent RPA testing processes as it not only helps in faster test automation but also holds a competitive advantage in faster reaping of benefits.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has taught us a very crucial lesson. As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, put it at Microsoft Build 2020 to hundreds of developers, “We have seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in just two months!” Automation supported by intelligent automation platforms, robotic process automation plus AI has already played a role and will continue to do so. Putting in simpler words, RPA was not supposed to be on the roadmap before COVID19, but now it is. Various company executives want to focus on cost reduction while managing the remote business and use intelligent automation that improves resiliency, which enhances and diversifies their supply chain. The surge in automation investment and combating the recession pressures may cause risks to skyrocket for businesses, such as:
- The RPA bot maintenance and software quality while maintaining the resiliency. To keep the bots running in production and delivering value addition is hard to keep up with. The scare of malfunctioning is another threat to cope up with. If more incidents will happen, resiliency will struggle, and business will suffer
- Using RPA solutions in development doesn’t always keep up with a structured software development lifecycle process. If you have to build a bot, you need to start with code and scriptwriting. As and when the bots become more sophisticated, to help you automate more complex workflows, it takes more design, code, and engineering work
- RPA solutions don’t really provide all the testing capacities required in the QA process. The RPA vendors have just recently started developing and building automated testing capabilities, error handling and reporting, debugging support, or documentation on how to test a bot prior to production, which is sufficient enough for the initial stage of RPA in the testing zone. The test automation tools come with a wealth of additional testing capabilities
In several new researches, it is seen how all the competency, technology, and practices developed in the software testing world for the last 30 to 40 years can and should be leveraged to properly build and test RPA at scale. Enterprise Test Automation has evolved fast in the past years with Agile and DevOps. The strengths that testing brings to the table with its continuous test automation technology are:
- Quality discipline and mindset
- Simulation and end-to-end testing
- Nonfunctional test automation
- Regression functional test automation
Future of Enterprise Test Automation:
Due to the several benefits of Robotic Process Automation, a great future of testing in RPA has been observed. At present, around 75–80% of the tasks are performed through manual testing across the IT industry and 20% of the repetitive testing tasks are carried out by traditional automation testing tools available in the market such as Selenium, QTP, Load runner, etc. Whereas about 5–7% of the tasks are performed by the robots in BPO, finance and insurance sectors.
But nowadays, RPA is becoming a more popular automation tool. Most of the repetitive tasks will get automated using RPA, but it may take some time to perform the non-repetitive task because the existing RPA software is not very well developed, it only enhances the usage of artificial intelligence and machine learning in software testing.
RPA and Sector-Wise Advancements
As per the researches, in future 50% of the testing and QA tasks will be performed by robotic process automation, 30 % of the task will be automated using traditional automation and a very less percentage of the task will be taken care of by the manual testers. According to researches, a huge reduction in manual testers is observed. Due to COVID-19, the reduction in the manual testing procedures is due to the huge pressure on cost-cutting, faster time to market and more accuracy. The robotic automated testing will evolve slowly in most of the domains, such as education, healthcare, insurance, finance, and the automotive industry. But few industries will continue to use traditional automation or manual testing due to the following reasons:
- Incompetence to accept change
- Lack of financial plan
- Company size
Thus, the RPA vendors make sure that most of the RPA opportunities exist in the areas where manual testing is still utilized and where executives want to shift to automated testing. RPA will have a major role in the IT industry as it is more independent, programming language free in which the software is developed. Various applications based on web, mainframes, desktops or mobile applications can be easily automated and testing through RPA. Even if the application is executing on virtual machines can also automate easily irrespective of the programming language.
There will be a huge effect of RPA in the industry in the coming years. The manual and traditional testing practices will be used, but the opportunities will be mostly curbed by RPA testing processes. As most of the work will be done by the robots, we need to acquire and update our knowledge to train the robots. Nowadays, most organizations are implementing RPA and it will be going to increase in the upcoming year. The RPA not only emphasizes on the testing processes but also the external environment and customer-oriented processes. This means that the effect of the RPA would be much better in the future in the testing industry. RPA when integrated with other up and coming technologies and tools, the companies feel that automation tools function best alone, but when they combined with other tools they function seamlessly. The RPA processes will be so enhanced that it will be able to make the decision and add creativity to the work which will enable the enterprises to automate the enhanced visibility, transparency, and communication.
Technology is a huge investment, and it’s usually a risky game to try new software especially when it comes to small businesses. However, there are many ways in which robotic process automation can be more beneficial for small businesses that are willing to take the plunge. Getting RPA is like hiring a whole team of grunt workers for a fraction of the cost, which will make the small team more efficient and enable them to explore new opportunities.
Testing Automation: With RPA or Without it?
As most human being tasks are going to perform by robots, RPA is going to influence manual as well as traditional automation testing in future. RPA enables the experts to accomplish the high-end performance task from their computing systems. Robotic process automation plays an important role in the development of quality assurance and it offers industries a chance to add extra value to their essential stability and scalability models with less investment.
