Robotic process automation is a field that has reached maturity. And while RPA can be applied in fields like customer onboarding, data entry and migration, sales and lead nurturing, testing is one of the breakthrough areas where the importance of automation is being felt.

“RPA is a business-critical software that runs in your production environment, and so you probably have to test,” said Gerd Weishaar (pictured, right), senior vice president of product management, Testing Products, at UiPath Inc. “We came up with the idea that we create this Test Suite. We’re using proven technology from UiPath, and and we built this offering and brought us into the market for RPA testing and for application testing.”

Weishaar and Matt Holitza (pictured, left), VP and general manager of Cloud Elements at UiPath, spoke with Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during UiPath’s Forward IV conference. They discussed the current state of enterprise-level RPA testing and how UiPath is planning to get more organizations on board with the practice through its Test Suite platform. (* Disclosure below.)

Expediting the testing process

When Weishaar first joined UiPath, the first thing he did was assess how the company’s customers tested RPA. The answer revealed that the main issue with RPA testing was that not enough companies and businesses were implementing it.

“We did a survey with 1,500 people, and 27% said that they wouldn’t test at all,” he said.

The current market paradigm is that some organizations run much of their testing operations manually as opposed to automating the bulk of the repetitive tasks, according to Holitza. The use cases UiPath has seen so far make the case for automated testing. For instance, some users of UiPath’s Test Suite have already achieved significant milestones, including deploying test teams and RPA teams and building reusable libraries that allow for faster testing through reuse of about 70% of previously existing components, Holitza added.

“When you think of automation, you’re thinking about automating the application, not automating a process or a test, so that people can use those like Lego blocks and build it if they’re doing so. They could even pull those existing components out and reuse those,” Weishaar stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of UiPath’s Forward IV conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the UiPath’s Forward IV conference. Neither UiPath Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE