My biggest mistake as an RPA developer

My biggest mistake as an RPA developer
anupam.de

I understand the niche, but I don't particularly care for it. It's an enabler for shortsighted, 'keep the lights on but cut costs and corners' operating strategies that usually go hand-in-hand with technical debt accumulation and brain drain.

It really seems to be an enterprise (and large-scale professional services) focused tool. It was difficult to get support as a small consulting agency working for a small client.

For the most part, the developer community is very insular and lacks a lot of technical skill. Its primarily Indian and latin american developers using RPA to get into the field. It was frustrating at times needing help on a platform-specific issue and being directed by the same social engagement-focused "experts" to watch their own "tutorial" videos when it didn't answer the question I was posing, and they had nothing to offer besides their video. When I did help answer people's questions in the forums, I was hounded with unrelated questions in my direct messages because I appeared competent. Its very much a "here's my problem please fix" kind of community, where the goal is to solve their immediate issue instead of learn how to do it themselves.

I'm a little jaded to the field of RPA after my experiences. UiPath has some novel solutions to targeting GUI elements using a selector language and introspecting the structure of the GUI itself, but the lock-in and licensing costs really make it inaccessible to most small-medium sized businesses, the performance is really poor, and the development effort of making a resilient solution is pretty high.

I think if I were to get back into it, I would look at workflow languages without a visual workflow designer instead, and avoid GUI interaction in the process at all costs.

I've always been averse to "low code, no code" solutions. Most of the problems that these seem to solve are mostly already addressed by programming tools. Even version control has GUI nowadays.

Because business processes are poorly documented. And if they are more or less documented they are executed by teams that need to override the underlying technology when a "corner case" happens. As someone else has said, shit needs to get done.

You cannot successfully deploy an RPA project without understanding the business process behind it. And that usually means shadowing the people doing the "clerical" work

An interesting perspective comes from the process mining vendors (which is to say Celonis these days), which goes the other way: look at the application logs to extract event data in order to create a model of the business process. And then they move downstream: perform conformance checking (how is the "as-is" model different from the normative BPMN process) and even perform task mining (what are the users doing for each step of the process)