The first phase was the initial status analysis of the HR Virtual Assistant development and chatbot testing process. The RPA tool makes it possible to test and detect broken hyperlinks in HR Virtual Assistant responses, and it greatly simplifies and automates the chatbot testing process.
Background
As a result, the chatbot automation testing tool using the RPA technology was developed based on the literature reviewed and the results of the initial condition analysis.
Challenge, Objective and Outcome
Thesis Outline
A description of the chosen research approach is presented, along with an overview of the research phases.
Research Approach
According to Coghlan and Brannick (2014), the first phase of the action research cycle is to define the issue(s) within the research topic that will be addressed. Throughout the development process, the author observed that the action research is very similar to the ordinary day-to-day software development process, which is typically based on the process of identifying a problem or need, developing a plan to solve the situation, developing, testing, and finally implementing a software program to complete.
Research Design
The output of this phase is a good understanding of RPA and UiPath software applications, which supports the development of the RPA chatbot testing tool. The RPA tool for testing HR Virtual Assistant hyperlinks is the result of the third phase.
Data Collection
This chapter describes the initial state analysis of the development and chatbot testing process of the case organization's HR virtual assistant. The first subchapter of the Initial Status Analysis chapter describes the HR Virtual Assistant overview.
HR Virtual Assistant
In addition, there were weekly meetings and discussions with the Technical team about the HR Virtual Assistant overview and architecture. The fallback intent is triggered when the HR Virtual Assistant cannot understand or interpret the user's expression.
Initial Chatbot Testing Process
Chatbot content developers and software developers said that apart from testing the response accuracy, checking if there were any broken links in each response from HR Virtual Assistant was an extremely difficult task. An example of the response containing a link to an external website on HR Virtual Assistant User Interface (UI) is presented in Figure 6. In Figure 6, the hyperlink on HR Virtual Assistant UI displays as expected because the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is wrapped in an element and uses the href attribute, also known as a Hypertext Reference.
Chatbot content developers have stated that they can only detect a broken hyperlink format by manually entering a question into the HR Virtual Assistant and verifying that the hyperlinks in the HR Virtual Assistant response are displayed correctly. The initial state of the chatbot testing process revealed that the HR Virtual Assistant is frequently and manually tested to ensure its accuracy. Additional resources may be required to administer the test due to the high volume of HR Virtual Assistant questions and answers.
As explained in the previous chapter, the author mainly focuses on the development of a test tool to detect the broken display of hyperlinks on a chatbot.
Robotic Process Automation
- Advantages of RPA
- RPA Drawbacks and Limitations
- Selecting Processes for RPA
- Types of RPA
According to Asatiani and Pettinen (2016), new jobs can be created such as robot control, consulting and sophisticated data analysis. Therefore, identifying the appropriate process is a critical factor as it can affect the success of the RPA implementation. According to Asatiani and Penttinen (2016), the process suitability for RPA can be determined based on routine or non-routine processes and whether it requires the use of manual or cognitive affordances.
RPA can effectively manage complex processes if all process steps and complexity are defined and can be accurately documented. It is essential to know whether a process is suitable for RPA implementation because the suitability of the process to be automated can affect the success of RPA development (Santos, Pereira & José. High-volume transactions are suitable for RPA because if tasks are repeated with a large volume, RPA software robots can do them faster and with fewer errors.
Furthermore, it is vital that the process can be broken down into clear rules, as RPA is only able to perform rule-based tasks.
UiPath
UiPath Studio
Activities panel (2) consists of several available activities that can be added to the current workflow. The activities required for the workflow can be searched by name or description and easily dragged to the current project. User events activity can be used to trigger a specific sequence when the developer clicks on an element or an image.
The Activity Name, Activity Type, and Description columns are written according to the UiPath Studio Activities Guide (UiPath 2021), while the column with the "Input" header. UiPath Studio supports multiple types such as text, number, true or false, data table, date and time. The text variable Text can be used to store text value such as usernames, employee names and other strings.
Data Table The data table variable is used to store large amounts of information and acts like a database or spreadsheet with rows and columns.
UiPath Selectors
The next chapter describes the RPA chatbot testing process, which was developed in collaboration with the Chatbot content developers of the case organization and was based on the initial condition analysis findings. The third subchapter is the centerpiece of the tool development, describing the development of the RPA chatbot testing tool.
Overview of The Development
Hyperlink Testing Process Flowchart
The RPA chatbot link process is initiated by the RPA robot reading the data in the Excel file. The RPA robot creates a new Excel sheet and adds a new column with header status to that sheet. The RPA robot iterates rows from the response column and checks if the response contains URLs or any hyperlink attributes.
In that case, the RPA robot will access the HR Virtual Assistant and type the corresponding question in the HR Virtual Assistant's typing box and press enter. When the answer is displayed in the HR Virtual Assistant user interface, the RPA robot detects whether the hyperlink is correctly displayed in the user interface. If so, the RPA robot marks the new column as a valid hyperlink; otherwise Invalid Hyperlink is highlighted.
The RPA Chatbot tool for hyperlink testing had to read this Excel file and verify that the questions and answers added to the HR Virtual Assistant had a valid hyperlink format and were displayed correctly in the user interface.
Developing Testing Tool Utilizing UiPath Studio
Indicator on Screen Option of Click Activity Drop Down Button was used to select HR Virtual Assistant open button UI element. The following code is used in the ArrayRow as the input of the Add Data Row activity to the dataOutput variable. The HR virtual assistant text box is selected with the On-Screen Indicator option.
It was observed that the selected UI element was invalid because the HR Virtual Assistant Responses UI element was not static. An index variable was created and the default index number was set to the number three. Added assignment activity at the end of the If activity under the Element Exists activity and inside the For Each Row activity so that the value of the index variable is incremented in the For Each Row loop after the If activity is fulfilled.
An email message subject included the UiPath bot string and the name of the Excel file.
RPA Chatbot Hyperlink Testing Tool
The Excel file, after UiPath Robot ran, contains two sheets (1) named Input and Output. Input sheets contain input data that UiPath Robot initially reads and enters into the HR Virtual Assistant. The Output sheet contains the same question and answer columns (2) as the Input sheet, and a new column named status (3) created by the UiPath bot.
Once all the rows have been scanned and all the values in the status column have been filled, UiPath Robot will perform the process of sending the email. The UiPath bot determines if any row in the status column contains the string Invalid Hyperlink. If the status column shows an invalid hyperlink value, the UiPath bot will send an email to the Chatbot content developers with an attachment.
To validate the performance of the UiPath robot, the process had to go through several rounds of testing.
Recommendations for the Next Steps
In the meeting with HR Platforms Lead and Software Architect, the RPA tool was presented and used to test several FAQs Excel files. They also recognized the importance of the proposed RPA tool for the initial chatbot testing process. HR Platforms Lead was interested in adopting the RPA tool and looked forward to using RPA in other processes related to chatbot development and other HR processes.
Essentially, the Excel test case template, hyperlink testing flowchart, and RPA hyperlink testing tool will be developed and deployed from test environment to production environment using UiPath. The RPA tool will be integrated and modified to be uploaded to the company's Orchestrator, which will eventually eliminate the need to run on a PC. Multiple meetings will be held with RPA developers to discuss the future capabilities of the RPA tool.
An RPA tool for testing chat rooms was just presented in this study, but its more intelligent and efficient operation would require further research.
Self-Evaluation
It would be interesting to investigate whether using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in the RPA tool would create a smart process and workflow that thinks, learns and adapts on its own as they can ease the requirement of well-documented decision logic and even test cases. The HR Virtual Assistant can guide the user through a conversation flow to gather the necessary information and then send it to the RPA Robot to perform tasks such as updating personal information, ordering equipment or any other journey that meets the requirement. The first phase was the initial condition analysis, including comprehensive study of HR Virtual Assistant, initial HR Virtual Assistant testing process.
The third phase of this study was the development of the RPA tool, which was created in collaboration with experts from the case organization. Challenges of Automated Software Testing with Robotic Process Automation RPA - A Comparative Analysis of UiPath and Automation Anywhere. URL: https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/robotic-process-automation-end-entrepreneurial/docview se-2?accountid=27436.
Robotic automation emerges as a threat to traditional low-cost outsourcing URL: www.horsesforsources.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/RS- 1210_Roboticautomation-emerges-as-a-threat-060516.pdf.
List of UiPath activities used in tool development
RPA Chatbot Hyperlink Testing Workflow in UiPath
