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We are looking for automation processes and we read about automation anywhere . We do have regular automated functional testing tool. Why cant we use them in production versus buying huge license product such as automation anywhere ? Writing automation in functional testing tool involves development effort but it heavily reduces license cost versus automation anywhere RPA.
Can someone expertise in automation anywhere please explain how RPA is different in these perspective ?
The biggest hype over the RPA technologies is that it is relatively easier to create automation with those tools (they are almost like scratch programming, using diagram flow to create common tasks and processes) so even business people can own the robot and edit when necessary. Of course this depends heavily on the complexity of the process.
Companies nowadays are creating RPA team's to create a repository of objects (think of libraries of code) or API's and then the business units with lower level of programming skills can just develop their specific process using those objects pre-made by the real developers ;)
Automation Anywhere comes with lot of features to handle complex business scenarios such as validating data and entering data into a database test automation tools focus on screen automation to pass test cases while tools like AA user to do automation + implementing desicion making steps
Choose RPA tool for functional testing only when :-
If you need to communicate with multiple types Application Desktop App , services,
SAP,PDF etc.
if you need proper analysis of ROI or business and other Operational Analytics based
on some input like price.
if you need Surface Automation using RDP or citrix.
if you have some repetitive task for large sets of data then you can save your man
effort.
The key difference between automated testing tools and a full service RPA, like Automation Anywhere, is the intention of making this a production level solution. RPA is intended to be scaled to touch various levels in your organization. It is not designed to only be ran attended on one local machine. AA treats created bots just like a well-tuned development department, with built-in version control, scheduling, and even ROI analytics on the use of those bots. If you only have a few processes that you want to automate, then I would suggest investigating the use of automated testing tools that could run on a dedicated vm. But if your organization is wanting to setup and allow for multiple bot creators, scheduling and prioritizing unattended bot runners, all while maintaining appropriate change control oversight then going with a full service RPA solution is probably more appropriate.
As a side note, I am an IT auditor for a public company that has just started using Automation Anywhere. Their product is mature enough and has enough appropriate production level controls that we are comfortable with allowing it to handle financial data in an unattended state. RPA tools like this one are certainly intended for your more intermediate users. The interface is easy for a non-programmer, but advanced users also have available features that make it more powerful. I doubt most automated testing tools are as portable or user friendly.
You can also try out their community edition or watch some of their videos for free.
Automation anywhere and automation testing are two different concept.
Main focus of the automation anywhere is automate the Repetitive tasks.
e.g Download the email attachment and upload to OneDrive.
If you are looking for automate the testing and create test cases for the application with fail or pass results then go for Selenium.
Automation anywhere has cognitive automation, you do an action couple of times like copying the customer name from pdf file to the 3rd column of excel sheet and your bots will learn it to do it automatically for thousands of records. You can't expect it to happen via traditional web or API automation tools. This is just one example, there are many complex business scenarios which can't be done via test automation tools.
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We are a small company and i am a test coordinator appointed to bring a process in testing for the company.
We dont have a testing process in place. Development-Deployment and testing happens almost daily and the communication is established over skype or mails.
How do i start to bring a testing process in place?
We have operations running in 8 different countries and we dont have a dedicated testing team for testing. The business users are the testers we have.
It is crutial for me to get them all to testing when required.
So how do i bring that change in the way they work?
Any suggestions or help is kindly appreciated.
I think the best approach for this changing is show the test value for your managers.
I suppose that without well organized test process the bug finding happens eventually. The value of one crucial issue find by your customer but not by you may lead to the huge impact on the company business. Well, you may wait when it will happen or just start to build the test group.
Also this is the common fact that finding bugs as soon as possible saves a lot of money for the organization. This is mostly because fixing the issue close to the development time requires much less time.
I would recommend Jira as the open source tool which allow to organize the bugs tracking and also supports agile development process.
I would suggest to consider Comindware Tracker - workflow automation software. It executes processes you create automatically by assigning tasks to the right team member, only after the previous step in the workflow is completed. Furthermore, you can create forms visually, set your own workflow rules and have your data processed automatically. You can configure Comindware Tracker to send e-mail notifications to users when a particular event occurs with a task or document, or to send scheduled e-mail reports. Discussion threads are available within every task. You can share a document with a team and it will be stored within the task, document versioning is supported.
Perhaps the key reason why small company just starting to optimize workflows should consider Comindware Tracker is its ability in changing workflows in real-time during process execution without the need to interrupt it. As you are likely to make plenty of changes during the course of your starting phase, this solution is worth of attention. This product review might be useful - http://www.brighthubpm.com/software-reviews-tips/127913-comindware-tracker-review/
Disclaimer – I work in Comindware. We use Comindware Tracker to manage workflows within our company. I will be glad to answer any question about the solution, if any should rise.
If you are looking to release frequently then you should consider using automated regression testing.
This would involve having an automated test for every bit of significant functionality in your applications. In addition, when new functionality is being developed an automated regression test would be written at the same time.
The benefit of the automated regression test approach is that you can get the regression tests running in continuous integration. This allows you to continuosly regression test and uncover any regression bugs soon after the code is written.
Manual regression testing is very difficult to sustain. As you add more and more functionality to the applications the manual regression testing takes longer and makes it very difficult to release frequently. It also means the time spent testing will continually increase.
If your organisation decides not to go with test automation then I would suggest you need to create a delivery pipeline that includes a manual regression testing phase. You might want to consider using an agile framework such as Kanban for this (which typically works well with frequent releases).
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We are building a large CRM system based on the SalesForce.com cloud. I am trying to put together a test plan for the system but I am unsure how to create system-wide tests. I want to use some behaviour-driven testing techniques for this, but I am not sure how I should apply them to the platform.
For the custom parts we will build in the system I plan to approach this with either Cucumber of SpecFlow driving Selenium actions on the UI. But for the SalesForce UI Customisations, I am not sure how deep to go in testing. Customisations such as Workflows and Validation Rules can encapsulate a lot of complex logic that I feel should be tested.
Writing Selenium tests for this out-of-box functionality in SalesForce seems overly burdensome for the value. Can you share your experiences on System testing with the SalesForce.com platform and how should we approach this?
That is the problem with detailed test plan up front. You trying to guess what kind of errors, how many, and in what areas you will get. This may be tricky.
Maybe you should have overall Master Test Plan specifying only test strategy, main tool set, risks, relative amount of how much testing you want to put in given areas (based on risk).
Then when you starting to work on given functionality or iteration (I hope you are doing this in iterations not waterfall), you prepare detailed test plan for this set of work. You adjust your tools/estimates/test coverage based on experiences from previous parts.
This way you can say at the beginning what is your general approach and priorities, but you let yourself adapt later as project progresses.
Question about how much testing you need to put into testing COTS is the same as with any software: you need to evaluate the risk.
If your software need to be
Validated because of external
regulations (FDA,DoD..)
you will need to go deep with your
tests, almost test entire app. One
problem here may be ensuring
external regulator, that tools you
used for validation are validated
(and that is a troublesome).
If your application is
mission-critical for your company,
than you still need to do a lot of
testing based on extensive risk
analysis.
If your application is not concerned
with all above, you can go with
lighter testing. Probably you can
skip functionality that was tested
by platform manufacturer, and focus
on your customisations. On the other
hand I would still write tests (at
least happy paths) for
workflows you will be using in your
business processes.
When we started learning Selenium testing in 2008 we created Recruiting application from SalesForce handbook and created a suite of tests and described our path step by step in our blog. It may help you get started if you decide to write Selenium code to test your app.
I believe the problem with SalesForce is you have Unit and UI testing, but no Service-level testing. The SpecFlow I've seen which drives Selenium UI is brittle and doesn't encapsulate what I'm after in engineering a service-level test solution:
( When I navigate to "/Selenium-Testing-Cookbook-Gundecha-Unmesh/dp/1849515743"
And I click the 'buy now' button
And then I click the 'proceed to checkout' button)
That is not the spirit or intent of Specflow.
Given I have not selected a product
When I select Proceed to Checkout
Then ensure I am presented with a message
In order to test that with selenium, you essentially have to translate that to clicks and typing, whereas in the .NET realm, you can instantiate objects, etc., in the middle-tier, and perform hundreds of instances and derivations against the same BACKGROUND (mock setup).
I'm told that you can expose SF through an API at some security risk. I'd love to find more about THAT.
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I have being toying with the idea of creating software “Robots” to help on different areas of the development process, repetitive task, automatable task, etc.
I have quite a few ideas where to begin.
My problem is that I work mostly alone, as a freelancer, and work tends to pill up, and I don’t like to extend or “blow” deadline dates.
I have investigated and use quite a few productivity tools. I have investigated CodeGeneration and I am projecting a tool to generate portions of code. I use codeReuse techniques. Etc.
Any one as toughs about this ? as there any good articles.
I wouldn't like to use code generation, but I have developed many tools to help me do many of the repetitive tasks.
Some of these could do nice things:
Email Robots
These receive emails and do a lot of stuff with them, they need to have some king of authentication to protect you from the bad stuff :
Automatically logs whatever was entered in a database or excel spreadsheet.
Updates something in a database.
Saves all the attachments in a specific shared folder.
Reboot a server.
Productivity
These will do repetitious tasks:
Print out all the invoices for the month.
Automatically merge data from several sources.
Send reminders of GTD items.
Send reminders of late TODO items.
Automated builds
Automated testing
Administration
These automate some repetitive server administration tasks:
Summarize server logs, remove regular items and send the rest by email
Rebuild indexes in a database
Take automatic backups
Meta-programming is a great thing. If you easily get access to the data about the class structure then you can automate a few things. In the high level language I use, I define a class like 'Property' for example. Add an integer for street number, a string for street name and a reference to the owning debtor. I then auto generate a form that has a text box for street number and street name, a lookup box for the debtor reference and the code to save and load is all auto-generated. It knows that street number is an integer so its text box can only accept integers. If I declare a read only property it will also make sure the text box is read only.
There are software robots, but often you really don't see them. For example consider a robot that is used to package stuff. There is a person who monitors the robot in case of a failure. When the robot fails, the person shuts the robot down and fixes things. That person is like a programmer who operates IDE to compile, refactor etc. When errors occur, the programmer fixes the code and runs the compiler again.
Well compiling is not very robot like, but then there are software that compile your project automatically. Now that is more like a kind of a robot. That software robot also checks things in the code like is there enough comments and so on.
Then we have software that generates code according to our input. For example we can create forms in MS Access easily with Wizards. The wizards are not automatically producing new forms form after form after form, because we need every form to be different. But the form generator is a kind of robot-like tool that is operated.
Of course you could input the details of every form first and then run generate, but people like to see soon every form. Also the input mechanism is the form pretty much already, so you get what you create on the fly. Though with data transformation tools you can create descriptions of forms from a list of field names, generate the forms, and call that as using robots.
There are even whole books about automated software production, but the biggest problem is, that the automation of the process lasts longer then the process itself.
Mostly programmers give up on this, since they try to achive everything on one step, from manual programming, to automation.
Common automation in software production is done through IDEs, CodeGenerators and such, until now nearly no logic is automated.
I would appreciate any advance in this topic. Try to automate little tasks from the process, and connect those tasks afterwards. Going step by step.
I'm guessing that, just like just about every software developer on planet Earth, you want to write software that writes software by itself. Unfortunately, it's an idea that only works on paper. I mean, we have things like code generators, DSLs, transformation pipelines, Visual Studio add-ins that statically analyse code and generate derivative code, and so on. But it's nowhere near anything one would call a 'robot'.
Personally, I think more needs to be done in this area. For example, the IDE should be able to infer things and make suggestions based on what I'm actually doing. For example, if I'm adding a property, the IDE infers what attributes other properties in the file has, and how the property itself is structured, and adjusts the property accordingly.
Any sort of AI is hard work and, regrettably, does not have such a great ROI. But it sure if fun.
Scripting away the repetitive tasks - that's what you refer? I guess you're a Windows developer where scripting is not as nearly common as in *nix world. Hence your question.
You might want to have a look at the *nix side of software development arena where the workflow is more or less similar to what you describe (at least more than Windows). Plowing your way via bash, perl, python, etc.. will get you what you want.
ps. Also look at nsr81's post in comments for similar scripting tools on Windows.
Code generation is certainly a viable tool for some tasks. If done poorly it can create maintenance problems, but it doesn't have to be done poorly. See Code Generation Network for a fairly active community, with conference, papers, etc.
Code Generation in Action is one book that comes to mind.
You can try Robot framework
http://robotframework.org/
Robot Framework is a generic automation framework,It has easy-to-use tabular test data syntax and it utilizes the keyword-driven approach.
Even you can used this tools as software bot (RPA).
Robotic Process Automation
First, a little back-story... In 2011, I was the Operations Manager for Contracting Center of Excellence at Bristol-Myers Squibb. We were in the early stages of rolling out a brand new Global Contracting System. This new system was replacing a great deal of manual effort across the globe with the intention of one system to create, store and retrieve Contracting information for all of the organization. No small task to be sure, and one we certainly underestimated the scope and eventual impact of. Like most organizations getting a handle on this contract management process, we found it to be from 4 to 10 times larger than originally expected.
We did a lot of things very right, including the building of a support organization from the ground up, who specialized on this specific application and becoming true subject matter experts to the organization in (7) languages and most time zones.
The application, on the other hand, brought it's own challenges which included missing features, less than stellar performance and a lot of back-end work needing done by the Operations team. This is where the Robotics Process Automation comes into the picture.
Many of the 'features' of this software were simply too complicated for end users to use, but were required to create contracts. The first example was adding a "Contact" to whom the Contract would be made with. The "Third Party", if you will. This is a seemingly simple thing, which took (7) screens of data entry, a cryptic point of access, twenty two minutes and a masters degree to figure out, on your own for each one. We quickly made the business decision to have the Operations team create these 'Contacts' on behalf of our end users. We anticipated the need to be a few thousand a year. We very quickly passed 800 requests per week. With three FTE's working on it, we had a backlog ever growing and a turn-around time of more than two weeks per request. Obviously, this would NOT due in any business environment.
The manual process was so complicated, even my staff had a large number of errors in creating them, even as subject matter experts. The resulting re-work further complicated the issue and added costs. I had some previous Automation experience and products that I worked with, but this need was even more intense and complicated than I had encountered before. I needed something great, fast, easy to implement and that would NOT require IT assistance (as that had it's own pitfalls.) I investigated a number of products, all professing to do similar things. One of course, stood out to me. It seemed to be the most capable, affordable and had good support options. The product I selected was Automation Anywhere at the bargain price of about $4000.00 USD.
I am not here to pitch for Automation Anywhere, or any specific product, for that matter. But, my experiences with this tool, forever changed my expectations and understanding of what Robotic Process Automation really means.
Now, don't get me wrong, I am not here to pitch for Automation Anywhere, or any specific product, for that matter. But, my experiences with this tool, forever changed my expectations and understanding of what Robotic Process Automation really means. (see below, if you are unsure)
After my first week, buying the tool and learning some of the features, I was able to implement a replacement of the manual process of creating a "Contact" in the contracting system from a two week turn around, to a (1) hour turn-around. It took the FTE effort of 22 minutes for each entry, to zero. I was able to run this Automated process from a desktop PC and handle every request, fully automated, including the validation and confirmation steps into other external systems to ensure better data quality than was ever possible, previously. In the first week, my costs for the software were recovered by over 200% in saved labor, allowing those resources to focus on other higher value tasks. I don't care where you are from, that is an amazing ROI!
That was just the beginning, now that we had this tool, and in fact it could do much more than this initial task I needed, it became one of the most valued resources for developing functional Proof of Concept/prototypes of more complex processes we needed to bridge the gaps in the contracting system. I was able to add on to the original purchase with an Enterprise License and secure a more robust infrastructure partnering with our IT department at a an insanely low cost for total implementation. I now had (5) dedicated Corporate servers operating 24/7 and (2) development licenses for building and supporting automation tasks and we were able to continue to support the Contracting initiative, even with the volume so much greater than anticipated with the same number of FTEs as we started with. It became the platform for reporting, end user notification, system alerts, updating data, work-flow, job scheduling, monitoring, ETL and even data entry and migration from other systems. The cost avoidance because of implementing this Robotic Process Automation tool can not be over stated. The soft-dollar savings from delivering timely solutions to the business community and the continued professional integrity we were able to demonstrate and promote is evident in the successful implementation to more than 48 countries in under (1) year and the entry of over 120,000 Contracts entered each year since.
It became the platform for reporting, end user notification, system alerts, updating data, work-flow, job scheduling, monitoring, ETL and even data entry and migration from other systems.
While the term, Robotic Process Automation is currently all the buzz, the concepts have been around for some time. Please, please however, don't make the assumption that this means it is a build and forget situation. As it grows, and it will grow, you need a strong plan to manage tasks, resources and infrastructure to keep things running. These tools basically mimic anything a human can do, and much more than a human as well. However, a human can rather quickly change their steps in a process if one of the 'source' systems she/he is using has a change in the user interface. Your Automation Tasks will need 'tweaked' to make that change in most cases. Some business processes can be easier than others to Automate and might be two complex for a casual "Automation task creator" to build and or maintain. Be very sure you have solid resources to build and maintain the tasks. If you plan to do more than one thing with your RPA tool, make sure to have solid oversight, governance, resources and a corporate 'champion' or I assure you, your efforts will not be successful.
Robotic Process Automation Defined:
(IRPA) Institute for Robotic Process Automation: “Robotic process automation (RPA) is the application of technology that allows employees in a company to configure computer software or a “robot” to capture and interpret existing applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses and communicating with other digital systems.”
Wikipedia: “Examples of robotic automation include the use of industrial robots in manufacturing and the use of software robots in automating clerical processes in services industries. In the latter case, the use of the term robot is metaphorical, conveying the similarity of those software products – which are produced to provide a generic automation capability and then configured within the end user environment to execute manual and repetitive tasks – to their industrial robot counterparts. The metaphor is apt in the sense that the software “robot” is now mimicking or replacing a function classically associated with a person.”