What is the RPA automation life cycle

 The process automation lifecycle involves form study of the existing system to Release. There is some specific steps to follow in order to implement an effective automation. Let us discuss the various steps in RPA process automation. If you are wondering what is RPA and how to identify a process fit for RPA and what are the tools to implement RPA then I strongly suggest you to check my previous posts. Now, the life cycle of a RPA process is as follows.

Ø  Process Study

Ø  Process Documentation

Ø  Process Development and code review

Ø  Process Testing

Ø  Release

Process Study: Every success story in process automation depends upon how well you understands the existing process . The process study will give the idea about what kind of robots they needed. Sometimes the robots as well as the humans have to work side by side like in the case of call centers. The well understanding of the process will determine the development quality like how can we split the process so that it will have high re-usability better exception handling. The process study results to the parameters like what kind of system required for the bot to run, the timings at which the bot should be running, the type of inputs and the transaction volume.

 Process Documentation:  The documentation provides step by step guidelines for the developers what steps to be considered while on developing. As well as the provides tracking the request and maintenance of the applications. There are two main type of documents that provided critical role in RPA development. Solution Design document and process design documents.

   Solution Design Document: It defines how the process will be automated. This document conveys IT and Business departments enough details regarding the process and ultimately approve the proposed process solution. It doesn’t contain the detailed low level steps rather it contains necessary details like is there any other deliverables besides the targeted process that includes input files, Network folders, Database tables etc..

•        Input data types, sources, rate, variation and quantity
•        Output data format and progress reports
•        Applications involved
•       Availability of test data

    Process Design Document: This includes the detailed description of the process in very much details so that the developer can follow this path for proper automation of the process. It contains the details of SME’s, Process description, Exceptions that to be considered while development. Out of scope items. In fact, in every bit of steps to be considered in the process development.

Process development and code review: This is the steps where the development of the process occurs. The process must be developed in such a way that the robot must be reliable in every step and must have capability to bounce back from any exceptions occurred while its running.

Process Testing: In this step the QA peoples comes in action. The tester will test if the automation successfully automated the process. What will happen if there is any error? Will the bots be reliable? They will test with the different test cases which is already prepared.

Release: Finally, the release. Once the bots are developed and tested the bots are ready to implement in production environment. The IT team will be set up the production environment so that the bot can run seamlessly.