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

on a less official and serious note, RPA is a marketing term for a Test Automation Robot pumped up with some kind of a Workflow Editor and some remoting Technologies

We were using standard Test Automation Robots(UFT, Selenium etc) to do some RPA with the backlash that the automated workflow was rather coded than visualized and we had to have some effort invested into the infrastructure to support scaling. (launching them en-masse and automatically)

What does it solve? - As mentioned above, visualising worfklows and scaling - although here it has limitations

What are the weak points?

• The Test Automation Robot wrapped inside the RPA can be very limited - in many cases they are less mature than state of the art TA Robots.
• The promise of record & replay and drag & drop your workflow. As always - we are not yet there
• It solves a problem in a way it shouldn't be solved; The GUI is for the user the APIs are for the software (or call them robots in this case). These problems should be solved by writing integrations between systems or extending existing APIs (safer, cheaper, much more reliable etc)