Which documentation you need and why?
If you worked in application development at any medium to large size company, you heard about Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). It’s a set of steps to implement a piece of software, in our case an automation. There are variations in definitions of phases, related documents and artifacts across the industry, so I’ll list things that make the most sense to me (yes, I know the picture doesn’t reflect the words, I just like the quick visual 🙂
- Planning
- Analyzing / Defining
- Designing
- Building
- Testing & Integration
- Deploying
- Maintaining
- Retiring
Each stage will produce some artifacts. For example, during the planning stage, you are selecting the business process to automate using the pre-defined criteria.
Here are some other documents and/or artifacts you should consider creating:
- Email Templates – for bot summary reports and failure notifications
- User Guide – captures any information related to how to interact with the bot. For example, if there is an input file that bot uses, what is the expected format?
- Troubleshooting Guide – this document captures what should be done for all known business and system exceptions
- Automation Performance Dashboard – to capture bots success rate and related KPI / metrics, for example: volume of data processed overtime, visibility into different categories of data processed, etc.