The RPA has a low barrier to entry. This is a skill that, in some cases, can be picked up for free: UiPath academy provides free courses and Community Edition license to get started. You don’t need to be a software engineer to get trained quickly and to be able to create automations. This is amazing for those of us who wants to keep learning and upskilling. At the same time, it creates challenges as those entering RPA workforce are not aware of best coding practices. It’s not a significant issue when the goal is to create an automation for a personal use (at home or in workplace), but it should be considered when implementation is done at an Enterprise level. Poorly developed bots will significantly increase the Total Cost of Ownership (TOC).
Just a reminder that most of my experience is with UiPath platform. As a result, some of the things listed below are only applicable to UiPath bots.
Here are some of the best practices that I would to be useful in developing automations:
- Start with the design, whiteboarding and to-be process diagrams. Here are the benefits
- highlights find gaps in understanding as well as potential process flows
- helps identify repeated code upfront
- identifies all needed arguments, which would also pin point any missing credentials, input and output system links, etc.
- Use RE Framework – build bots using Enhanced Robotic Enterprise Framework (RE Framework) – it’s a template provided by UiPath and can be used to develop, test and execute attended and unattended bots
- Modularize the code
- Define naming conventions for packages, workflows, variables
- Make sure the code is properly commented
- Bot Specific:
- Define Business and System Exceptions and outline the resolution path for each known exception
- To be continued …