The one thing that can really speed up RPA Developments: Stable, Reusable robot components

Not too long ago, I wrote an article about RPA initiatives that are collecting technical debt what will result in higher maintenance cost even in the short run. Let's now talk about the missed opportunities of having subpar solutions.

What is a reusable component?

Leading RPA providers like UiPath and Blue Prism found out a way to standardise and share part of the working solutions across the team years ago, but they didn't include this topic within their basic or even advanced trainings, so it requires some extra education on best practices.

In UiPath, it is not mandatory, but you can build Libraries for this purpose, while within Blue Prism, it is necessary to use Objects to interact with applications. The former needs extra attention on using this feature, the latter needs careful considerations on how to structure those elements to maximise reusability.

Once you have these built, all your robotic solutions can refer to a single place when they call an activity to conduct an interaction with an application. So if there are UI changes, you don't necessarily need to reverse-engineer and modify your solutions one-by-one, you can do it in one place and apply it through all of your processes.

Why should we use reusable components?

The reason why we can put together robotic solutions significantly faster within a more mature and technically well-managed RPA programme is that it has collected so much reusable components we can reuse. Within environments like these, development basically feels like going through a shop and just putting all the ingredients together to make everything work in the end.

Why are teams not using it?

When RPA initiatives start off, the team doesn't necessarily have the knowledge to do it right first time due to the reasons above. Some teams get to know about reusable components after a year or two. By that time, if they're successful with their programme, meaning that they've automated several processes, they already accumulated significant number of solutions with this kind of technical debt. So they need to convert all their solutions to catch up with the higher standards. And oh boy, how painful it is to go back and tweak those solutions. They all have the same things developed in them but in 5-6 different ways.

#RPA #Budapest #Hungary #RoboticProcessAutomation