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With the way things are going, I’m not sure learning a little bit of programming will help. Digitization has really begun rolling with RPA, because we now autom

With the way things are going, I’m not sure learning a little bit of programming will help. Digitization has really begun rolling with RPA, because we now automate system processes for systems with no apis and no direct data manipulation. But even though RPA is mostly screengrapping and macros, we’ve found it impossible to teach to people who aren’t developers. Similar with better BI tools it’s become possible for sql savvy business process people to do BI, but without s fundamental understanding of data efficiency, which we can’t seem to instill in these highly educated people, what they make is often useless because it slows the systems. Programming is completely trivial, but understanding what you’re doing, and why. Is much harder to teach than programming. Especially when you’re working toward productiveness where you can’t just write best practices for everything because best practices are often unnecessary for some systems and necessary for others. I know this wasn’t really that related to the article, it’s just a general observation, and believe me, we tried to decentralize our RPA processes because maintaining them is hell.

auxym 8y ago
What is RPA?
- czl_my 8y ago
  Robotic Process Automation, usually being done via AutomationAnywhere, BluePrism and/or UiPath
- jwally 8y ago
  Mostly screen scraping / macros. A lot of what I see is over marketed woo (“cognitive RPA”), but it’s basically a watered down version of selenium that (in theory) a programming novice could use to automate tasks. The tricky part is that there is a finesse involved to make it reliable and the exercise becomes more process improvement than programming. Most people struggle with this and you end up with a 2000 line-of-code Rube Goldberg machine that always breaks.
  - jwally 8y ago
    Following up on this is how heavy these things are marketed. We’ve spent around $1MM in the last two years on Automation Anywhere and around $2MM hiring consultants to implement it. Part of it is because our IT department is underfund and dysfunctional and RPA is the only “controllable” way to improve processes (in execution it’s not) and part of it is because our management have drank the cool aide that automation anywhere puts out about the impending singularity. I’m all for automation, more for process improvement; but at 2.5MM for a bunch of brittle macros running critical functions; it’s way oversold and too immature
    - gnychis 8y ago
      Please see my response! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18133835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18133835
- eksemplar 8y ago
  It’s a macro you program to use it systems through the UI. People already mentioned blueprism, uipath and automationanywhere, there’s a few others. It’s an immensely valuable digitization too in enterprise setups where you operate s lot of closed and/or legacy systems. Like we operate around 600 it systems, and very few of them talk to each other. So if you want to transfer data from one system to another, you’d need to have someone manually do it. Or you could automate it by using RPA software. Basically it’s what will do to the office space what the assembly lines did to factories. It’s also really terrible, because it breaks when the UI changes. But when companies refuse to sell open apis, it’s what you have to work with. The most ironic part is the IT companies that now sell RPA solutions for their own shitty software, but that’s the world we live in.
peteforde 8y ago
I had to Google RPA. Never heard of any of those tools. What I have heard of - and directly witnessed - is MS Access and MS Excel being used by non-developers to build surprisingly powerful tools to solve their most acute problems. They often don't even realize that they are programming.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Yes, that's true, but there are also plenty of cases of them making mistakes (the amount of money lost per year to mistakes in Excel spreadsheets is something obscene) and getting in way over their heads.
gnychis 8y ago
As a disclaimer, my name is George (https://george.nychis.com https://george.nychis.com) and I helped found a software automation company based out of Boston, MA that is "related" to this space called Soroco (https://www.soroco.com https://www.soroco.com). Our focus is around solving the kinds of problems you talk about. Building automation to replace repetitive and deterministic work across software systems in the enterprise. As you have learned, RPA is mostly screen scraping, macros, and as another person referred to it below "Rube Goldberg machines" that break when UIs change. For all of these reasons above (the need for automation and the limitations of RPA), we started Soroco. Like you said (and we agree) you can't build serious automation without real development. We take a fundamentally different approach which is to build a platform/SDK for automation that provides a significant amount of reliability on top of a number of unreliable automation layers. There is no other way to automate Windows applications or Java applications than through either A) Screen scraping, or B) Their accessibility layers (e.g., Windows UIA). The problem is that BOTH are extremely unreliable. For web, that equivalent is Selenium (at least as the primary layer). As another commenter mentioned below, a "watered down version of Selenium" is exactly what is NOT needed -- nor are Windows UIA or other accessibility layers great. They are all extremely unreliable. When something like Selenium fails to find an element, what do you do? Halt your business critical process? All of these frameworks were never built to handle business critical processes, they were mainly built for application testing. The RPA industry has basically tried to leverage them and pretend they are enterprise ready by hiding them behind flow chart builders. They are NOT enterprise ready. To draw an analogy, it's like having the Internet and IP, which do NOT provide or guarantee reliability. You need the equivalent of TCP and reliability layers. At Soroco, we have dealt with all of this and have put a tremendous amount of effort into building reliability layers on these unreliable systems, along with security, scalability, and machine learning. We construct automation systems using a full programming language (Python) and have built flow control layers and reliability on top of it. Sort of like an automation SDK for Python with a full IDE. We have lots of supporting microservices for storing credentials securely, storing information scalably, and deploying. We've even open sourced how we encrypt Python (https://blog.soroco.com/ https://blog.soroco.com/) What does "cognitive" mean in this field? At Soroco, we don't pretend automation systems can "self heal" or "self construct" -- that's just silly. For Soroco, cognitive means that if you had your automation system do the same thing over and over (e.g., during User Acceptance Testing)... what can it learn about the distribution of inputs or outputs to flag anomalous behavior? We also apply Machine Learning and Computer Vision to specific use cases to make them achieve what is not possible through a laundry list of conditionals. For example, ML/NLP to classify intents of text and to do things like binary or multi-class classification. There's a lot of noise in the RPA space. I'd be happy to share more with you if you want to reach out directly to me: george@soroco.com or gnychis@gmail.com
Marshen 8y ago
I've been mucking around with RPA a bit, and was wondering if you have any suggestions on writing tests?

auxym 8y ago

What is RPA?

czl_my 8y ago
Robotic Process Automation, usually being done via AutomationAnywhere, BluePrism and/or UiPath
jwally 8y ago
Mostly screen scraping / macros. A lot of what I see is over marketed woo (“cognitive RPA”), but it’s basically a watered down version of selenium that (in theory) a programming novice could use to automate tasks. The tricky part is that there is a finesse involved to make it reliable and the exercise becomes more process improvement than programming. Most people struggle with this and you end up with a 2000 line-of-code Rube Goldberg machine that always breaks.
- jwally 8y ago
  Following up on this is how heavy these things are marketed. We’ve spent around $1MM in the last two years on Automation Anywhere and around $2MM hiring consultants to implement it. Part of it is because our IT department is underfund and dysfunctional and RPA is the only “controllable” way to improve processes (in execution it’s not) and part of it is because our management have drank the cool aide that automation anywhere puts out about the impending singularity. I’m all for automation, more for process improvement; but at 2.5MM for a bunch of brittle macros running critical functions; it’s way oversold and too immature
  - gnychis 8y ago
    Please see my response! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18133835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18133835
eksemplar 8y ago
It’s a macro you program to use it systems through the UI. People already mentioned blueprism, uipath and automationanywhere, there’s a few others. It’s an immensely valuable digitization too in enterprise setups where you operate s lot of closed and/or legacy systems. Like we operate around 600 it systems, and very few of them talk to each other. So if you want to transfer data from one system to another, you’d need to have someone manually do it. Or you could automate it by using RPA software. Basically it’s what will do to the office space what the assembly lines did to factories. It’s also really terrible, because it breaks when the UI changes. But when companies refuse to sell open apis, it’s what you have to work with. The most ironic part is the IT companies that now sell RPA solutions for their own shitty software, but that’s the world we live in.

peteforde 8y ago

I had to Google RPA. Never heard of any of those tools. What I have heard of - and directly witnessed - is MS Access and MS Excel being used by non-developers to build surprisingly powerful tools to solve their most acute problems. They often don't even realize that they are programming.

emodendroket 8y ago
Yes, that's true, but there are also plenty of cases of them making mistakes (the amount of money lost per year to mistakes in Excel spreadsheets is something obscene) and getting in way over their heads.

gnychis 8y ago

As a disclaimer, my name is George (https://george.nychis.com https://george.nychis.com) and I helped found a software automation company based out of Boston, MA that is "related" to this space called Soroco (https://www.soroco.com https://www.soroco.com). Our focus is around solving the kinds of problems you talk about. Building automation to replace repetitive and deterministic work across software systems in the enterprise. As you have learned, RPA is mostly screen scraping, macros, and as another person referred to it below "Rube Goldberg machines" that break when UIs change. For all of these reasons above (the need for automation and the limitations of RPA), we started Soroco. Like you said (and we agree) you can't build serious automation without real development. We take a fundamentally different approach which is to build a platform/SDK for automation that provides a significant amount of reliability on top of a number of unreliable automation layers. There is no other way to automate Windows applications or Java applications than through either A) Screen scraping, or B) Their accessibility layers (e.g., Windows UIA). The problem is that BOTH are extremely unreliable. For web, that equivalent is Selenium (at least as the primary layer). As another commenter mentioned below, a "watered down version of Selenium" is exactly what is NOT needed -- nor are Windows UIA or other accessibility layers great. They are all extremely unreliable. When something like Selenium fails to find an element, what do you do? Halt your business critical process? All of these frameworks were never built to handle business critical processes, they were mainly built for application testing. The RPA industry has basically tried to leverage them and pretend they are enterprise ready by hiding them behind flow chart builders. They are NOT enterprise ready. To draw an analogy, it's like having the Internet and IP, which do NOT provide or guarantee reliability. You need the equivalent of TCP and reliability layers. At Soroco, we have dealt with all of this and have put a tremendous amount of effort into building reliability layers on these unreliable systems, along with security, scalability, and machine learning. We construct automation systems using a full programming language (Python) and have built flow control layers and reliability on top of it. Sort of like an automation SDK for Python with a full IDE. We have lots of supporting microservices for storing credentials securely, storing information scalably, and deploying. We've even open sourced how we encrypt Python (https://blog.soroco.com/ https://blog.soroco.com/) What does "cognitive" mean in this field? At Soroco, we don't pretend automation systems can "self heal" or "self construct" -- that's just silly. For Soroco, cognitive means that if you had your automation system do the same thing over and over (e.g., during User Acceptance Testing)... what can it learn about the distribution of inputs or outputs to flag anomalous behavior? We also apply Machine Learning and Computer Vision to specific use cases to make them achieve what is not possible through a laundry list of conditionals. For example, ML/NLP to classify intents of text and to do things like binary or multi-class classification. There's a lot of noise in the RPA space. I'd be happy to share more with you if you want to reach out directly to me: george@soroco.com or gnychis@gmail.com

Marshen 8y ago

I've been mucking around with RPA a bit, and was wondering if you have any suggestions on writing tests?