Are you a testing professional excited about upcoming changes in the testing domain? If you aren’t excited, you might be afraid, as you are observing test automation taking over the manual testing activities.

We are living in an age where technology is changing very fast. To overcome new challenges, there must be better and faster ways to test software products. This clearly indicates that the need to support faster time to market will require people with automation skills.

Face the Facts: Software testers with manual testing skills alone won’t cut it in today’s job market

Yes, exploratory testing is important, and testers have certain skills that many developers do not have, but the fact remains that automation testing continues to rise.

If you closely see future trends you’ll realize that the tester’s and developer’s roles are merging because of practices like DevOps (Development and Operations), Quality Engineering, CI/CD (Continuous Integration & Continuous delivery).

And now after test automation, you are hearing about RPA but what is RPA or Robotic Process Automation?

As the name suggests, it is an “Automation of processes done through Robots”. The important thing to know is we are not talking about mechanical robots but the software robots that are also called as “Bots” in the software industry.

These software robots help to perform a sequence of meaningful steps to carry out a particular task that is repetitive and boring for a human to perform. Automation of such repetitive tasks allows performing these activities in a way where no human intervention is required. Some examples of repetitive tasks are processing of a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses and communicating with other digital systems.

RPA can help organizations boost their capabilities and save money and time with robotic process automation software. RPA provides dramatic improvements in accuracy and cycle time and increased productivity while allowing a human to free up their time to perform more creative activities.

These RPA tools provide a new powerful toolset for testers and business users doing testing. RPA tools allow running codeless automation macros on the desktop. These tools can be used for test data, regression testing & much more.

These are some popular RPA tools available to RPA users for diverse needs and applications.

• Automation Anywhere
• UiPath
• NICE
• BluePrism
• EdgeVerve
• Workfusion
• Pega / OpenSpan

Want to explore more about RPA? I would suggest exploring these resources:

Udemy Courses:

Robotic Process Automation – RPA Overview

UiPath – RPA Robotic Process Automation

Note: UiPath is the top tool to learn RPA and it does not require any knowledge of programming languages to use it to implement RPA. UiPath has a standard Studio version which has a trial period of 60 days. UiPath also comes with a Community Edition which is free for life and has most of the functionality of the Studio version.

By learning these skills, a whole lot of opportunities will open up for you and you will remain marketable as a tester. You better be prepared for upcoming changes instead of being afraid.