RPA Vs Traditional Automation Tools

Question

I am Test Automation engineer and recently got opportunity to explore RPA tool blueprism. After exploring I found it similar to UI automation tools supporting various technologi

Answer 1

There are many flavours of RPA. Blueprism is not an ideal example of what modern RPA should look like, consider checking out Automation Anywhere or UiPath (both offer Community Edition you could download and try for free). While technological differences may not be that vast (and indeed RPA vendors are now looking at test automation as a market for their products), biggest differences are in the ways the platforms are engineered, to name a few:

1. Security-oriented approach, RPA platform is designed to make sure it could handle important data responsibly.
2. Design for ease of use for non-technical people. Selenium is great but you need to know how to program to use it. UiPath requires easy drag-and-drop for the same things.
3. Working with unstructured data inputs, like OCR'ing documents and acting on them
4. ML integration, for decision making or extra capabilities. E.g. NLP stuff, sentiment analysis, helping OCR recognize new document formats etc.5. Integration with third-party like chat bots or BPM
5. Analytical and monitoring capabilities, to make sure that you know how long your bots take to do their work and to help them if they fail

Easy of use should not be discarded: With RPA it's a half an hour job to receive a request by mail, take data from SAP, build pivot in Excel and upload to a website in JSON format. Could you do that in other tools? Sure! Is that as easy? Usually no. So you could do poor man RPA with Selenium or AutoIT or bash or PowerShell, it will just be not as easy and will provide less capabilities while requiring more effort every step of the way. And if you do it properly you'll end up replicating one of the RPA platforms anyway.

Also in RPA there is usually but not always central coordination mechanism (ala Selenium Grid) to orchestrate several robots (up to 10k in UiPath case) to make sure they act in sync, have some sort of work queue, shift their workload, deploy processes to them etc. This makes all the difference for enterprise usage scenarios.