English | EN 
RoboCon 2022 conference was held in Bio Rex Helsinki from 19.-20.5.2022. Thursday was a sunny and warm early summer day and BioRex was booming with people from all over the world with one thing in common, Robot Framework, their favourite software automation tool. It was so nice to meet different software automation professionals and hear how they use Robot Framework in their daily work.
The event started with the Robot Framework Foundation presenting what had happened since last year and what’s next with Robot Framework development. Robot Framework community and ecosystem is still growing a lot and it’s downloaded more and more times each year. The newest Robot Framework version 5.0 contains new control functions, such as WHILE loops for continuous looping and TRY, EXCEPT, and FINALLY for better error handling. Another useful feature is inline IF which makes simple conditions more compact.
There were lots of wonderful presentations by great Robot Framework experts during these two days. I’ve collected here some of the most interesting stuff presented and try to highlight my key takeaways:
My key insights from presentations:
- Test intelligence for and with Robot Framework by Elmar Juergens showed how to visualize test coverage as tree structures, showing what parts of the SUT the tests cover and how to optimize test case execution order for faster test results
- Tests are talking, are you ready to listen? by Tatu Aalto talked about how to detect flaky tests and how to visualize flaky tests from metadata
- Bartłomiej Hirsz and Mateusz Nojek talked about Robotidy, Robocop and Sherlock, which all are tools for analyzing and formatting your Robot Framework code; together these three tools provide a very wide feature set for improving your code quality
- Accessibility checking with Browser Extensions by Elout van Leeuwen talked about the importance of accessibility testing and how to do it with browser extensions
- Using implicit context to create rich behavior driven keywords by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn showed an interesting way of gathering implicit context for behavior-driven keywords
- RoboSwag by Mateusz Nojek showed how to use your Swagger file to automatically generate API tests, seems like a very useful tool for repetitive API automation
- Output Robot Framework report using Github Actions by Joonas Venäläinen showed how to use his plugin Robot Reporter in your pipeline to publish Robot Framework results
- “For the very first time” – Start to Code, Test, Package & Publish your first Library by Many Kasiriha talk was very interesting to hear about the process of publishing your own library and what steps it takes to do it
- Robot Framework for silicon validation by Franz Haas and Sebastian Herz showed how RF is used for silicon validation and what resistance this tool change faced in the upper management
- HybridApp – hybrid testing by Jacek Kohut talk showed how to use same test code in SeleniumLibrary browser tests and also in webview-based mobile app tests
- Eggplant Library – connecting Robot Framework to advanced image-based automation by Andre Mochinin and Rico Feist showed how to use the Eggplant tool for image recognition
New Robot Framework libraries and tools:
– EggplantLibrary for Image automation tool Eggplant (https://github.com/amochin/robotframework-eggplant)
– CamundaLibrary for Camunda workflow automation (https://github.com/MarketSquare/robotframework-camunda )
– RPA Framework (https://rpaframework.org/ )
– OpenApiDriver (https://github.com/MarketSquare/robotframework-openapidriver ) & OpenApiLibCore (https://github.com/MarketSquare/robotframework-openapi-libcore ) tooling for REST API testing
– RoboSwag tooling for REST API testing out of Swagger, Open API specification file (https://github.com/MarketSquare/roboswag )
– PerfmonLibrary for collecting Windows performance statistics (https://github.com/damies13/robotframework-perfmon )
– rcc environment handling tool for packaging your RPA robots (https://robocorp.com/docs/rcc/overview)
– rfswarm performance testing tool (https://github.com/damies13/rfswarm )
– Robot Reporter, a GitHub Actions plugin for reporting Robot Framework results (https://github.com/marketplace/actions/robot-reporter )
– RobotStackTracer prints stacktrace on console on error (https://github.com/MarketSquare/robotframework-stacktrace )
– Oxygen converts results from other test tools to Robot Format (https://github.com/eficode/robotframework-oxygen )
– Robocop static code analysis tool for Robot Framework (https://github.com/MarketSquare/robotframework-robocop )
– Robotidy is a tool for autoformatting Robot Framework code (https://github.com/MarketSquare/robotframework-tidy )
– Sherlock is a tool for finding not used code, complexity and performance issues (https://github.com/MarketSquare/robotframework-sherlock )
– Poetry for package management instead of pip (https://python-poetry.org/ )
– AxeLibrary for accessibility testing (https://github.com/adiralashiva8/robotframework-axelibrary )
Thanks to all the speakers for their talks and to all the people contributing to the Robot Framework ecosystem. It was a real pleasure to meet live in person again. This RoboCon 2022 was a really fun time, hope to see you all again next year!
Best regards,
Tuukka
Sources:
RoboCon 2022, Available: https://robocon.io/
