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I'm not very familiar with a concept of testing in programming languages although I know the basic idea and some of the principles to test your code like unit tests and stuff. I haven't written any tests myself yet but the general idea is more or less clear. But when it comes to Robotic Process Automation I get stuck with how I should properly test my workflows.

If I have modules which don't interact with any interface then I can clearly create a test environment, that is a function and this function will pass some arguments and get the result which will be compared to the expected one.

But what are best practices to test the parts of a workflow which interact with interface and contain clicks, type into and all those things?

If anyone has any experience of creating automated tests in RPA, for instance, in UiPath, I would be grateful to see it explained. Any ideas, irrespectively to the proper experience lack or presence, would be highly appreciated anyway.

By the way if anyone worked in UiPath he could notice that they developed the so called ReFramework which follows best practices in RPA deployment according to their words. In this Framework they got a test folder and some test modules but I don't get how they work and how I should adjust them in order to match a program developed by myself.

MGMKLML
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Thanks for the question.

I am a RPA developer, and also tested the workflows but don't as a "Tester" perspective.

If you look there are many things to test.

case#1

As you said you are dealing with web portal, you might use click activity. There is one property called selector which is auto generated. Selector identify the UI element. There are many attribute in selector that may be static.This is wrong practice lets take example

Submit

in this idx and uipath_custom_id attribute are a static, this might change accordingly but the name Submit and class never change, So as a tester you can find this type of mistakes by the Developer...

Keep in mind that never give static values or numbers to any attribute in the selectors...Instead of that use
(* and ?) https://studio.uipath.com/v2017.1/docs/selectors-with-wildcards

It also happen that there are two buttons in web page having same name, same class so the selector which is generated is also some what same except ID so you need to take care of this also as considering ID always changes.

Always keep your workflow small, use proper activity and keep business logic in separate sequence activity Such things you can test. Also you can test the Optimization of the flow. If you are dealing with other application like Excel or SAP check that you can close it after your work done.

Such things you can test

Thanks It will be better if you tell the scenario so that community can help you tell about the test cases...:)

Abhishek Vaidya
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    Thank you for your answer. It's not that I usually deal with a website. Much more frequently I have to deal with desktop applications. I'm aware about best practices for a robot development and using non-static selectors are a part of it. You may also note that you can store those selector in a separate place, say, in an Excel-table-config-file which makes your life easier when you have to adjust them when migrating your project from a test environment to productive. The one issue left unanswered is how to test it all automatically. What you mentioned can be tested manually only :( – MGMKLML Aug 30 '18 at 08:30