Tech Thursday with SNOK: Agentic testing

From scripted testing to autonomous testing agents - how UiPath Test Cloud is changing the philosophy of software quality assurance

In 2020, the Consortium for Information & Software Quality put the global cost of poor software quality at over two trillion dollars. That’s not a typo - two trillion, with twelve zeroes. Most of that loss didn’t come from a lack of testing. It came from tests that arrived too late, were too rigid, or simply couldn’t keep pace with the rate of change in the code. Today, in the age of agentic automation, the testing model itself is undergoing a fundamental shift - from scripts that replay clicks, to autonomous agents that explore an application on their own, hunt for anomalies, and repair themselves when something breaks.

This isn’t a distant vision from a conference slide. It’s a reality that UiPath has named agentic testing and built directly into its Test Cloud platform. Forrester has confirmed that maturity, naming UiPath a leader in its Autonomous Testing Platforms report for Q4 2025 - with the highest possible scores across seven criteria.

Why test scripts stopped being enough

For decades, software testing rested on a simple logic: write a script that clicks here and there, checks the value in a field, and compares the result against expectations. If the result matches, the test passes. If not, log a defect and hand it to a developer. This model worked as long as applications were monolithic and release cycles ran in quarters or years.

But the world has changed. A modern enterprise application is a mosaic of microservices, APIs, cloud components, and integrations with external systems. A single Agile sprint can change dozens of user-interface elements. And every such change - even a cosmetic one, like moving a button by a few pixels or renaming a field label - breaks a traditional test script built on precise selectors.

Estimates suggest that fifteen to thirty per cent of all automated tests end in false negatives - not because there’s a bug in the code, but because the test itself is unstable or out of date. Engineers call these “flaky tests”, and every experienced QA team knows the problem first-hand. Each such case takes time to investigate: is this a genuine defect, or just a test that hasn’t kept up with change? As a result, QA teams end up spending more time maintaining tests than finding real defects.

It’s like hiring a guard who mistakes the front door for a window every morning because someone repainted the façade. A script doesn’t understand context. It doesn’t know why it’s clicking a button - it only knows where to click. That is the fundamental problem agentic testing sets out to solve.

What agentic testing is - and what it isn’t

Before getting into specifics, it’s worth clearing up one misconception. Agentic testing isn’t simply “better automated testing”. It’s a paradigm shift - a move from deterministic scripts to autonomous agents that understand the intent of a test, not just its steps.

In the traditional approach, a test says: “Click the button with the ID btn-submit.” A testing agent says: “Find a way to submit the form, and verify that the system processes the data correctly.” That’s a subtle but fundamental difference. The agent isn’t tied to a specific selector - it’s tied to a business goal. When the interface changes, the agent finds a new route to the same goal.

UiPath’s approach to agentic testing rests on three pillars. First: using ready-made AI agents built into the Test Cloud platform - from generating test cases to self-healing broken tests in real time. Second: building custom agents tailored to an organisation’s specific needs using the Agent Builder tool in UiPath Studio. Third: orchestrating agents, automations and people into coherent, managed testing workflows via UiPath Maestro.

That last point is critical. Without orchestration, even the smartest agent is an island. Only when agents, robots and testers work in a coordinated flow does testing become genuinely autonomous - not in isolated fragments, but from end to end across the whole cycle.

From project phases to a continuous stream of quality

In the classic software lifecycle, testing was a phase - one block on a Gantt chart, squeezed in between “development” and “deployment”. The QA team received a finished build and had a week to test it. When it found bugs, the build went back to the developers. And round and round it went, on a costly carousel the industry has tried for years to stop with the slogan “shift left”.

The problem? The later a defect is found in the cycle, the more expensive it is to fix. Repeated studies confirm that a defect discovered after production deployment can cost up to a hundred times more to fix than the same defect caught at the design stage. That isn’t an abstract statistic - it’s a real calculation covering developer time, context-switching, regressions, impact on end users, and lost customer trust.

Agentic testing proposes something radically different. Tests don’t wait for their “phase”. Testing agents run continuously - monitoring code changes, automatically generating new test cases from business requirements, running regression tests in the background, and repairing themselves when something breaks. This isn’t testing as a checkpoint. It’s testing as a continuous, intelligent stream that flows alongside software development - not slowing it down, but protecting it in real time.

Self-healing: the end of brittle tests

One of the most striking capabilities of UiPath Test Cloud is its generative-AI-based self-healing mechanism. When an automated test breaks - because a selector changed, a new modal window appeared, page load times shifted, or the interface was redesigned - Autopilot immediately diagnoses the cause of the failure and corrects the test’s logic so it can keep running without interruption.

Picture a large-scale regression run - thousands of test cases executed simultaneously across different environments, browsers and configurations. In the traditional model, any interface change could halt dozens of tests and require manual intervention. In the agentic model, Autopilot repairs tests on the fly, and a human tester simply approves the fixes before they become the new baseline for subsequent runs. That’s a safeguard - the agent doesn’t act without oversight, but it doesn’t require constant piloting either.

This is a fundamental shift in the economics of testing. Instead of maintaining an army of scripts that need constant care, the QA team can focus on what genuinely requires human intelligence: designing test strategy, analysing risk, exploratory testing of new features, and deciding when software is ready to ship.

Autonomous execution of manual tests

The second game-changing capability is the autonomous execution of manual tests. Autopilot can read a set of test steps written in plain language, understand the intent of each step, interact with the application, gather evidence in the form of screenshots, and record the results - all without a single line of code.

For many organisations, that’s a breakthrough. A large share of most test portfolios still exists as manual tests - described in spreadsheets or test-management tools, but never automated because the cost of automation was too high or the application too unstable. Now these tests can be run autonomously, without having to rewrite them as code. That means an immediate increase in test coverage for minimal effort.

The architecture of UiPath Test Cloud: how the pieces fit together

It’s worth understanding how the platform’s components work together. UiPath Test Cloud isn’t a single tool - it’s an integrated ecosystem in which each component plays a defined role.

Test Manager handles planning, monitoring and managing tests across every environment. It provides full traceability of requirements - from user story, through test case, to detected defect. It integrates with more than sixty application-lifecycle tools, so an organisation doesn’t have to abandon its existing toolset to benefit from the platform’s agentic capabilities.

Autopilot for Testers is the AI engine that accompanies testers at every stage. It generates test cases from business requirements, automates manual tests, repairs broken tests at runtime, and delivers results analysis in natural language. A tester can simply ask: “Which tests failed in the last run, and what caused it?” - and get a specific, contextual answer.

Agent Builder lets you build custom testing agents tailored to your organisation’s unique needs. An agent is defined in natural language - you describe the goal, role and responsibilities, and the platform translates that into a working component. This opens the door to scenarios standard tools will never cover: tests specific to an industry, a regulation, or an internal business process.

UiPath Maestro is the orchestration layer that ties everything together. Maestro manages workflows in which AI agents, traditional automations and people collaborate within managed, auditable processes. Without an orchestrator, intelligent components would operate in isolation - like musicians each playing their own score with no conductor. Maestro makes testing genuinely autonomous from end to end.

Next-generation performance testing

The latest release of Test Cloud, from late 2025, introduced full performance-testing capabilities. QA teams can simulate real user load - load, stress and endurance testing - by reusing existing functional tests. This removes the need to build separate performance scripts from scratch, and helps identify bottlenecks quickly before they reach production.

Research shows that just one-tenth of a second of faster page load can translate into a ten per cent increase in conversion. In e-commerce and transactional applications, performance isn’t a technical concern - it’s a revenue concern. Test Cloud lets you measure it systematically and continuously, not just before launch.

Agentic testing in the context of SAP and enterprise applications

For companies running SAP, Oracle, Salesforce or Workday, agentic testing matters in particular. These applications are complex, heavily configured, and often integrated with dozens of external systems. Testing such environments the traditional way is costly and time-consuming - every change to a SAP configuration, every transport, every support package can require testing hundreds of business scenarios.

UiPath Test Cloud offers native support for enterprise application testing, including deep integration with SAP. Testing agents understand SAP transaction structure, navigate Fiori and classic GUI screens, verify data in ALV tables, and test integrations between modules. This isn’t a generic click recorder - it’s a tool that understands the context of an enterprise application and can navigate it with intent, not just instructions.

In the Forrester Wave report for Q4 2025, UiPath received the highest possible scores for SaaS business application testing and for testing-agent orchestration. Analysts noted that UiPath’s strategy rests on a clear vision of an agentic platform with self-healing mechanisms and predictive analytics spanning testing, monitoring and release management.

The SNOK perspective: from process automation to quality automation

As a UiPath Platinum partner, SNOK is watching this evolution closely - and actively taking part in it.

For years, we’ve built RPA solutions for clients, integrations with SAP systems, and automation architectures spanning entire value chains. But increasingly, we’re hearing a question from clients that would have seemed exotic just a few years ago: “Can you help us automate our testing?”

That question has a solid business rationale. Many organisations, particularly in the public and financial sectors, run extensive SAP environments where every update requires substantial regression testing. QA teams are overloaded, testing windows shrink every quarter, and the traditional approach - based on manual scenarios and brittle scripts - simply doesn’t scale.

Three pillars of SNOK’s value in agentic testing

Designing agentic test strategy. We don’t start with a tool - we start by understanding the client’s business processes, technology environment and risk profile. On that basis, we design a testing architecture that combines AI agents with traditional automation and human oversight. Every client has a different context - a one-size-fits-all template won’t work.

Building and configuring testing agents. We use Agent Builder to create agents tailored to a client’s specifics - SAP transaction tests, cross-system integration checks, post-migration data validation. The agents operate within Maestro orchestration, ensuring full auditability and regulatory compliance. The Intelligent Automation team, led by Michał Korzeń, combines experience in UiPath process automation with deep SAP expertise - the foundation on which SNOK has built its reputation, with a team bringing together 25+ years of cumulative SAP experience.

Continuous optimisation and support. Agentic testing isn’t a project with an end date - it’s an ongoing process. Agents learn, requirements change, applications evolve. SNOK provides ongoing support to maintain and improve the testing ecosystem - monitoring agent performance, analysing defect trends, and adapting strategy to a changing technological and business context.

Results that speak for themselves

UiPath Test Cloud clients worldwide report concrete results. Companies such as Cisco and EDF have achieved over ninety per cent test automation while accelerating release cycles and cutting costs by up to eighty per cent. Thanks to agentic automation, Suncoast Credit Union now checks ten times more cheques, preventing an estimated nearly three million dollars in fraud losses. Cato Networks projects that forty per cent of IT tickets will be resolved fully autonomously.

For the Polish market, these figures carry particular weight. In an environment where IT budgets face constant pressure and QA teams are protected by an ever-thinner barrier of manual tests, test automation isn’t a luxury. It’s a condition for operating effectively in a world of continuous updates, growing regulatory requirements, and ever-shorter deployment windows.

Trust and oversight: controlled autonomy

Any discussion of autonomous agents has to answer one fundamental question: who controls the agent? That question matters especially in testing, where a malfunctioning agent could mask real defects instead of catching them.

UiPath approaches this from a position of “controlled autonomy”. Agents can act independently, but within defined policies and guardrails. Every agent action is logged and auditable. Test fixes made by Autopilot require human approval before becoming the new baseline. The AI Trust Layer ensures agents operate to the highest standards of security and governance - including protection against language-model hallucinations and real-time masking of sensitive data.

UiPath has achieved AIUC-1 certification - becoming the first enterprise automation platform to meet this AI agent safety and reliability standard. The certification was carried out by Schellman, the largest specialist cybersecurity auditor. For organisations subject to regulations such as NIS2, DORA, or Poland’s national cybersecurity act, this level of certification and auditability is not optional.

At SNOK, we treat security and compliance as the foundation of every deployment, not an add-on. Our experience with SecurityBridge for SAP, bowbridge, and Zero Trust methodologies lets us design agentic testing environments that meet the strictest regulatory requirements - from identity management to protecting sensitive data in test scenarios.

The Polish market: specific challenges, concrete answers

The Polish IT market has its own characteristics that shape how agentic testing gets adopted. Three trends deserve particular attention.

The public sector and the requirement for local solutions. Public institutions - among the largest users of SAP systems in Poland - often prefer or require on-premise infrastructure. Test Cloud addresses this by letting organisations run testing bots either in the cloud or on their own servers, letting organisations with regulatory constraints benefit from the platform’s agentic capabilities without breaching security policy.

KSeF. Poland’s National e-Invoicing System (KSeF) is generating huge demand for integration testing. Every company deploying KSeF within SAP must verify dozens of scenarios: certificate-based authentication, sending and receiving structured invoices, exception handling, Cloud Connector integration. Agentic testing makes it possible to automate these scenarios and run them continuously - not once before go-live, but with every configuration change.

Migrations to S/4HANA. Thousands of Polish companies face a mandatory move to S/4HANA. Every such conversion is a huge testing effort - regression across all business processes, data validation, performance testing, verification of integrations with external systems. Without test automation, an SAP conversion project turns into an SAP testing project - and typically an underestimated one, in both cost and time.

The future: tests that get ahead of the bugs

Where is agentic testing heading? If the current direction holds - and everything points that way - the coming years will bring predictive testing. Agents that don’t just react to code changes, but anticipate them.

Imagine a system that analyses defect history, patterns of code change, and production data to identify the areas of an application most likely to fail - and automatically concentrates testing resources there. Forrester analysts have named predictive analytics a key element of UiPath’s strategy alongside self-healing and agent orchestration. It’s the natural next step: from reactive testing, through adaptive, to predictive.

Gerd Weishaar, UiPath’s Senior Vice President of Testing Solutions, has signalled further investment in greater platform autonomy and proactivity - while keeping security and oversight as its foundations. That caveat matters. Autonomy without control is a risk. Autonomy with control is a transformation.

Where to start: a pragmatic path to adoption

Organisations considering agentic testing don’t need to start with a revolution. The most effective path is incremental, built on quick wins and gradually growing capability.

The first step is usually to identify the most “brittle” tests in the existing portfolio - the ones that most often require manual intervention and generate the most false alarms. Deploying self-healing on just that group of tests delivers an immediate, measurable effect: fewer interruptions, less time lost to diagnosis, more attention paid to genuine defects.

The second step is automating manual tests that were previously too costly or risky to automate by traditional methods. Autopilot lets you run them without rewriting them as code, which means a fast increase in test coverage without investing in classic automation.

The third step - and this is where a consulting partner’s expertise comes in - is designing a target architecture for agentic testing that accounts for the client’s specific environment, regulatory requirements, and application roadmap. At SNOK, every such project starts with a diagnostic workshop that lets us assess the potential for test automation and plan a realistic roadmap.

The key is not to treat agentic testing as just another tool to buy, but as a shift in how you think about quality. A tool can be bought in a day. A culture change takes time, support and consistency. But organisations that make that shift gain something more than faster tests - they gain the ability to ship software with confidence that every release has been verified to a standard that, just a few years ago, would have required a far larger team. And in a world where speed of delivering value determines competitive advantage, that difference translates directly to the bottom line.

A change of perspective

For years, we treated testing as a cost - a necessary phase that delayed deployment and burdened the budget. Agentic testing reverses that logic. Tests become an asset - a continuous guardian of quality that works around the clock, learns from its mistakes, and adapts to change faster than a person can.

For organisations that take software quality seriously, the question is no longer “Should we automate testing?” It’s “Can we afford not to?”

Sixty-eight per cent of users abandon an application after encountering just two bugs. Development teams lose thirty to fifty per cent of sprint time firefighting instead of building new features. And the cost of fixing a bug found in production is a multiple of what it would have cost to catch it earlier.

These numbers are an argument that speaks to any board. And agentic testing - backed by the UiPath Test Cloud platform and the expertise of a partner like SNOK - is finally an answer that’s technologically mature enough to change those numbers for good.

SNOK helps organisations in Poland move from reactive to proactive testing - combining 25+ years of the team’s cumulative experience in the SAP ecosystem with UiPath Platinum partner status and cybersecurity expertise. If you’re planning an S/4HANA conversion, a KSeF rollout, or want to build an agentic testing strategy for your organisation - let’s talk.

www.snok.ai