Automated tests in RPA

Question

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.

Answer 1

i will try to explain you with a example:

click activity can be used for web interface. Selector identifies the UI element and have many properties that are static

as a tester you can find mistakes in static part.

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

try working on small and logical workflows.