Automation Ops brings new features for developers

Introduction

Automation Ops is the product in the UiPath Platform mostly known for its governance features. It enables center of excellence (CoE) leads and automation team leads to have centralized control of how UiPath products are configured. For developers using UiPath Studio Web, StudioX, or Studio, to establish guardrails that are aligned to industry best practices. For users of attended, automations can be used to control what Assistant options are available.

Automation Ops has developed over time, and we keep adding new features to integrate into your day-to-day workflows. Let’s see what a development process should be like and how those features come to support it.

The development process

Automating business processes can be rewarding! You can quickly get satisfaction due to the parts of the daily routine that are lifted by the robots. Specifically, the robots are playing the part you have written.

Once they play such a key role in your everyday work, the way automations get built becomes really important. The way automations are built is important because this is reflected in the quality of the automation, time to delivery, and the cost. Therefore, the process needs to be efficient, reliable, and scalable.

Fortunately, this is not a green field. Others have already explored some of these areas and how processes can be improved. In software development, this has been iterated several times and although there is no one-fits-them-all method, the consensus tends to be to use the fail-fast, fail-cheap approach.

This approach promotes shorter iterations in development that deliver small increments of the overall product in the hands of stakeholders for validation. This has the advantage of course-adjustment early in the development process, so ‌wasted resources are at a minimum.

Agile development

The generically called fail-fast, fail-cheap approach to software development has a name: agile practice. You can read its manifesto here. The agile manifesto improved the software development process. It promotes the following:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• Working software over comprehensive documentation

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• Responding to change over following a plan

You can read more about how agile development can be embraced for automation development in this white paper. In this article we will not deep dive into this subject and since this method can speed up your activity, I recommend some time for exploration.

Automation Ops is more than governance

The new features in Automation Ops speed you up in your automation development process. Some of them are just released in 2023.10: Solutions Management (preview), Azure Repos in Source Control, and Access Control for Automation Ops. Let's take a closer look.

Deploy complex automations with Solutions Management (preview)

Ensemble all the automation resources into one file that can be deployed anywhere. When deployed, the resources are created without manual configuration. Check Solutions Management (preview).

Connect your GitHub or Azure (preview) repositories to UiPath Automation Cloud™  in Source Control

Have a view on the source code of the automations right in Automation Cloud™. Connect your GitHub or Azure (preview) account to your UiPath organization and the automation project's source code becomes available for review. Check Source Control.

Delegate the Automation Ops related tasks with the new Automation Ops Access Control

With all of these new tools, it is expected you will need more hands on deck.  Opening access to more than just the administrator role, work can now be delegated. We created roles that enable you to assign new users to Automation Ops without them becoming administrators. Check out the Automation Ops roles in our documentation.

Use CI/CD pipelines to streamline your automation development

CI/CD pipelines speeds up the development process by performing a lot of tasks out-of-band for automation developers. 

Automation Ops Pipelines (preview) are nothing more than automation doing specific activities. You do not need other providers or technology than UiPath ‌to set up a CI/CD pipeline. 

For constrained environments, we provide components you can use to create CI/CD pipelines. Current options include UiPath Azure Tasks, UiPath Jenkins Plugins, and the UiPath CLI (command line interface) tool for a more generic approach. Check the Automation Ops Pipelines (preview).

Conclusion

Automation Ops centralizes ‌governance, solutions, management, source control, CI/CD pipelines, and feeds management. It can be specific to different industries since it offers professional tools for development and deployment. Establishing the right processes from the beginning paves the way for scaling automation further. Visit UiPath Documentation Portal to deep dive into implementation steps.

Ready to test the new features? Join the UiPath Insider Program to start playing with the latest innovations and share feedback directly to our product engineering team.

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