Developing an RPA Solution
Train Your Development Team
Your RPA development can include anyone from non-technical business users (citizen developers) to trained IT specialists. All that's really necessary is the willingness to learn, although logical thinking skills are a definite plus. More experienced developers can help get everyone up to speed by acting as mentors for others.
Beginners will, however, need the time and opportunity to get familiar with the basics, such as the Studio recorder, and advanced command like keyboard shortcuts, input keys, and so on. Advanced developers can jump right in to learning more advanced commands, and upskilling on technical skill sets like JavaScript, Python, .NET, and so on.
Extensive training material is available from the Nintex Academy and in the Nintex Community. You can also arrange specific online training from Nintex.
As your development team becomes more familiar with RPA, they should begin documenting the internal automation best practices that are relevant for your applications, and the systems used in your business processes.
Set Up Your Automation Environments
Ideally, you should set up the following two automation environments with identical settings, installed applications and versions, folder access rights, and so on:
|
Environment |
Description |
|---|---|
|
Development
|
Used for all development and resolution of identified issues. This environment should also be used for unit testing, wizard integration testing, and User Acceptance Testing (UAT). |
|
Production
|
Used for live RPA operation. |
|
Playground
|
A third, optional environment can be used as a playground for RPA brainstorming. |
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The wizards should be moved from the development environment to the production environment as soon as possible, because the stabilization and optimization of the wizards usually has to be done in production, with real-life context and data. For details, see Moving Wizards Between Environments | Best Practices.
Pay special attention to the system parity of your automation environments! That is, the systems should be as similar as possible to ensure smooth migration and interoperability.
For more information about this topic, review the following training material from Nintex Academy: RPA Admin Training.
Development
Design and develop your RPA solutions/workflows following best practices (and additional resources/information), as described in Designing an RPA Solution, and as covered during training.