Robotic process automation is already a mature solutions niche. So, as companies stand-up thousands of simultaneous workflows, how can they efficiently monitor to ensure that such a core business process doesn’t break in production?

“So RPA testing [happens] on the UiPath Test Suite, which, as the name suggests, is a suite of products,” said Thomas Stocker (pictured, left), director of product management at UiPath Inc. “It’s actually part of the existing platform in which we use Orchestrator as the distribution engine. We also use Studio to create automation. And on top of that, we build a new component, which is called the UiPath Test Manager, an analytics and management platform where you have oversight.”

Stocker and Neeraj Mathur (pictured, right), director of intelligent automation at VMware Inc., spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and David Nicholson at UiPath Forward, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how UiPath approached RPA testing for VMware and a host of other organizations. (* Disclosure below.)

Why VMware continuously tests the ‘robot code’

RPA is basically the assigning of computer software to carry out repeatable tasks, and the process is done mostly with programming and code. And beyond the speed and scalability upside of RPA testing, VMware sees it as an integral element of the continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline, according to Mathur.

“And the way we were able to also improve on the quality of our delivery was to have an automated way of doing the code reviews and doing the testing using this platform as well,” he said.

Testing code in live production environments is inherently disruptive to the production pipeline. So, VMware circumvents this by doing the tests on the “golden copies” of the data.

“The way we’ve built this actually is to do the testing in the separate test environment on that as well by using very specific test data from the business,” Mathur explained. “We call that the golden copy of that test data because we want to use that data for months and years to come. We don’t touch any production environment data.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the UiPath Forward event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the UiPath Forward event. Neither UiPath Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE