2026-03-04 –, RoboCon Online
IBM MQ is the backbone of asynchronous communication in today’s complex microservice landscapes, trusted by governments and enterprises for mission-critical reliability. Yet Robot Framework ecosystem lacked native IBM MQ support, forcing testers into fragile workarounds far from production reality. That’s why we built MQLibrary: a PyMQI-powered wrapper enabling seamless, production-like MQ interaction in automated tests. In this talk, we’ll share our journey, challenges, and how MQLibrary takes test automation to the next level.
Hi, our names are Niels Janssen and Elout van Leeuwen. We’re test automation engineers and for the past year we worked for the Employee Insurance Agency (UWV) in The Nederlands. UWV is known for it’s microservice landscape. These microservices mostly interact with the help of IBM MQ (message queues). A message queue is essentially a mailbox. A simple example could be that one application puts something in the mailbox, while another application can get things out of that mailbox.
The advantage of using IBM MQ is that not both services need to be up and running all the time to communicate (asynchronous). Instead, we use the message queue. Now one application can put a message on the queue and can go offline, while the other application can get the message from the queue whenever it goes online. There are way more cases and variations to use message queues, this is just a simple explanation to be able to grasp the concept.
IBM MQ is still one of the most used message queue middleware applications to date within government corporations. While working with message queues at my current client, we noticed a lack of support for automating message queues with Robot Framework. Because of this shortcoming, we saw workarounds to simulate queues, for example by forcing services to use a windows directory as the “queue” and placing “messages” into that folder. Other services were configured to read from this directory instead of a real queue, and tests/assertions were done on the files within these directories.
But offcourse this is not ideal because within testing we should always strive towards a test environment that is as close to the production environment as possible, as discussed in the TMAP literature.
In our search for a suitable solution we did stumble apon a Python package called ‘pymqi’ with which automating of IBM MQ is possible, but this was not yet properly integrated into the robot framework ecosystem. This is why we created the MQLibrary. MQLibrary acts as a wrapper for pymqi and makes interacting with queues possible directly from within Robot Framework.
New Library, Storytelling, Test Automation
Is this suitable for ..?: Beginner RF User, Intermediate RF User
Elout van Leeuwen is a RFCP certified Test Automation specialist, trainer and manager with years of Robot Framework experience. He has a strong focus on scalable automation strategies. Elout brings a unique blend of technical precision and human connection to every project and presentation. He is a board member of the Foundation and an ambassador for Robot Framework.
Niels Janssen is a Test Automation Engineer with experience in building and maintaining test automation frameworks using Robot Framework and Python. He has worked on backend (APIs, databases, IBM MQ) and frontend automation, created custom libraries, and integrated solutions into CI/CD pipelines with Azure DevOps. Niels is also an experienced trainer in Robot Framework and passionate about keeping test automation simple and effective, following his KISS mentality: Keep It Simple, Stupid!