Selenium vs RPA
Technology in recent days has reached the peaks and therefore the growth of automation has added more wings to the present transformation from automating a simple unit test to automating the whole business process technology has augmented its way to the digital era.
In this article, we are going to compare the two booming automation technologies that have been in the industry for more than a decade that is robotic process automation and selenium you might wonder why are they of such great importance well stick on to this article to find out what exactly are their features and how they differ from each other based on certain parameters.
Firstly, we’ll start by understanding what is automation and take a real-time example that demonstrates the advantages of it and then we’ll go through the different types of automation that exist, and after that, we’ll see a brief introduction to the different forms of automation that is automation testing and business process automation which are the major fields where one can try to build a career. Then we’ll go through the automation testing tool that is selenium and learn its features once we’re done with that, we’ll take a look at the business process automation technology RPA and comprehend how it is used to automate repetitive tasks moving further we’ll see about the parameters taken into consideration for comparing both selenium and RPA and talk about the similarities between these tools.
Let’s start by understanding what is automation what is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word “automation”.
Is it a robot? or a web service? or a file handling function? Technically all!
Here, is the formal definition of automation-
Automation is something that reduces human intervention to complete the desired task.
Now let’s consider this particular example suppose you want to pay a bill and the due date is very near but you are not in a situation where you
can physically go there and pay it as you know every time you want to make a transaction you need to add in some details so that the system acknowledges that it’s a genuine user and not a malfunction it is obvious who is ready to go there stand in the queue fill in the forms and then pay the bill right? Technology has improvised so much that there is an option called automatic bill payment. Where the amount to be paid is directly deducted from the respective account and the user can pick a date in that month letting the firm know that they can process the transaction on that given date. Isn’t it interesting? The way automation has evolved.
All right so now that you’ve understood what is automation.
Let’s try to understand the different types of automation that exist. There are three types of automation depending on the process which the user defines they are:
- Fixed automation
- Programmable automation
- Flexible automation
1) Fixed automation
- Fixed automation is nothing but the sequence of various operations that remains fixed and cannot be scheduled or customized by the user this type of automation is mainly used in the mechanical industry to carry out the desired job.
2) Programmable automation
- Programmable automation can be used to change the sequence of any operation based on the requirements specified by the user it has made it to the front end of the user interface by providing various options to the user to edit the sequence as per the requirements.
3) Flexible automation
- Flexible automation can inherit both fixed as well as programmable automation. It can produce a variety of sequences that are not just limited to one static type of automation.
Okay, so now we have understood the different types of automation
Let me introduce you to the automation testing suite selenium and talk about the importance of this tool. In any software or application that is
being developed needs to be tested thoroughly to ensure that the system does not break down under a given circumstance.
So, what is testing?
Testing refers to the process of evaluating the functionality to make sure that the system works fine and helps in detecting errors. Automation testing is more preferred over manual testing because it reduces the errors that occur during the simulation of the process.
What is Selenium?
Selenium as you all know is an automation tool that is used to
test web applications you might think it is just a testing tool why is it of such great importance why not the other tools that help in testing the answer to this would be it is because selenium makes the process relatively easy by providing valuable functionalities and libraries that help in testing any software or web application. Selenium is an open-source portable framework used to automate the test cases in a web application that can be run on different browsers like- Chrome, Safari, Opera, Explorer, and so on and supports cross browsing too. Talking about the languages that are used to write the scripts selenium supports different programming languages like Java, Python, Ruby, C#, etc. But the most commonly used language among these would be java because of its user-friendly behavior. The license of this tool is free of cost. The latest version available in the market is selenium 3.1.
What is Robotic Process Automation?
It is commonly called RPA patients are very tedious and try to take most of our time which gradually decrease the productivity and result in the downfall of an organization. Now if we try to complete the same task by automating it the time taken to finish the task is reduced, the rate of productivity increases and the number of errors is reduced. RPA was coined with the vision of empowering business users to create software bots that would interact with the system just like humans. It is a combination of artificial intelligence and automation. Now you might think which programming language should I learn to work on RPA well the answer to this would be none. RPA runs on the end user’s pc programming the software is not required as RPA deals with the database and problem-solving capability so, the organizations worldwide are transforming to this new technology because of the various advantages that are about RPA.
Similarities between Selenium and RPA:
- Selenium and RPA both are automation tools used to automate tasks selenium automates web applications and RPA automates business processes.
- Both these tools are rule-based by rule-based means they follow a set of procedures to automate any given task.
Differences between Selenium and RPA:
Type of automation:
Selenium supports programmable automation whereas RPA supports flexible automation. Programmable automation can be used to change the sequence of any operation based on the user requirements whereas flexible automation is a hybrid of fixed and programmable automation.
The cost of these tools:
Selenium is an open-source tool used to automate web applications whereas RPA has a set of tools like Uipath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. Among these Uipath is free for community edition and the advanced versions are licensed whereas Automation Anywhere gives you a free trial for a month and the advanced versions are licensed as well coming to Blue Prism which is completely licensed.
Programming knowledge:
Selenium does require the knowledge of java to run any test case whereas RPA does not require any coding knowledge as it deals with the backend processes and the database operations.
Their life cycle:
The life cycle of selenium is a little complicated compared to that of RPA. Selenium deals with test planning generating basic test cases enhancing the cases running and debugging the tests and analyze and report defects whereas RPA deals with just four processes are analysis bot development, testing, and support and maintenance.
Platform dependency:
Selenium can be run on different browsers and it can test only the web applications, no mobile or desktop applications can be tested using selenium whereas RPA can run on any platform be it web mobile or desktop applications.
Components used:
Selenium uses web drivers to automate any task this is a simplified view of selenium web driver test scripts written in any programming language that can be invoked by the system and is automated using selenium web driver that can run on different browsers like Chrome, Safari, Mozilla, and so on whereas RPA makes use of robots to complete a task consider the situation where you need to enter data from different sources and you have a time constraint of several minutes how would you do that? The smart answer would be by automating. RPA bots help in automating the data from different sources and saves it in the form of an excel file where you can find the data in a sequence.
Level of automation:
Selenium does not automate any clerical processes it automates functional regression and performance testing whereas RPA automates all clerical processes like data entry calculations and so on.
The use case of automation:
Selenium works on the front end of the process whereas RPA works on the back end selenium can test only the current web page whereas RPA
deals with the processes that are time-consuming this is how the data is stored onto the database the browser details are sent via the web server and are stored in a sequence onto the database.
So that’s about the parameters to compare both selenium and RPA. The most commonly asked question about selenium and RPA is :
- What if I try to use RPA as a testing tool?
>> I would say both selenium and RPA help in delivering automation solutions talking about using it as a testing tool it can be used to test web applications but it is not recommended let me talk about the practical aspect that resists RPA from being a test machine RPA is not directly applied to the product but it is applied to the processes associated with the business environment whereas selenium completely depends on the product for testing a case and about selenium as RPA and selenium cannot be used as RPA because it does not automate business processes.
That’s it about selenium versus RPA. Hope you liked it!
Thank You for reading!
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