Is it a good idea to use TagUI (RPA tool) for website automation? if so what are the merits of using this tool over selenium?


I have never used TagUI and actually I have never heard about it before you asked your question :) However I googled a bit and considered this topic interesting. Let me share my view on that (however I might be mistaken here).

So to answer you question we should understand that Web Automation is a kind of general term. It does not related to testing actually. It just means that we automate some interaction with the services which are built over the web technologies (normally Html/JS/Css).

So TagUI (as far as I can see from the really meager amount of KB resources over the Internet) is actually about Robotic Process Automation paradigm that does not aim any sort of testing (finding defects) as the major objective but rather to automate enterprise processes using the same interfaces as regular human-workers do (for example a robot might take a parcel from conveyor, recognize the parcel's properties and register it using some common web / or other kind of interface). The latter action is what TagUI is intended to be used.

Basically, as far as I can see (again, having no practice with the tool I might be mistaken), you can easily substitute TagUI with Selenium in RPA but I would avoid using it for testing. If you still want to incorporate TagUI into your testing process, I would use it for E2E testing after you have stabilized your SUT in more specific phases. So the conditions to use TagUI would be the following:

  1. You have stable UI on your WebSite, since the more simple your UI is, the more effective TagUI is
  2. You have different types of UI in your E2E flow (Web, Navtive GUI)
  3. You might want to use Python or R code in your flow (TagUI claims that they can integrate with AI, but as it seems to me, this is more the marketing rather than some real power of the tool, since their integration just means running Python from your script)

So to sum up I would not recommend to use this tool for system testing, however it might still be acceptable for some side automation processes as the part of E2E or as some helper in semi-automated testing.

  • Thanks Alexey for your reply :) I thought of using this tool because with few lines of code we can automate. But after seeing your reply I got some idea. – kartronics Dec 10 '18 at 17:13

I have design few pages in selenium, now explored RPA tool(Automation anywhere). I feel easy to design pages using this tool since it has inbuilt commands available for each action, window control etc. Also it captures all the elements attributes, its upto us which to select. If its dynamic, just find a way to capture d element unique way. RPA tool takes control over all kind of application all together unlike selenium. In selenium we can only use one URL, not windows applications. But in RPA we can use any app in system.

Its just 1st month of starting RPA, learned many things.

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