Decoding CodeIQ: A Case Study of How We Helped our Client Speed-up Project Delivery Time

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When we were first approached by our client for resolving an issue they were having with their RPA, our team at Seosaph had never worked in the RPA domain until then.

For the uninitiated, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology to build software robots that are capable of replicating human actions and behaviors. These robots mimic human tasks such as logging into systems, entering keystrokes, copying and entering data, identifying and extracting data, navigating systems, managing data across multiple applications or workflows, calculating and performing other diverse range of predefined actions.

When RPA is used in combination with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, even complex tasks such as capturing data or context from images — extracting names and addresses, interpreting terms and conditions in invoices, and even reading handwriting could be accomplished.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Along with the problem statement, our client also informed us that they had made multiple attempts in the past at resolving this problem, however, none of those attempts yielded the desired results.

The task was challenging, no doubt. Plus, we had to navigate a learning curve which seemed quite steep at the time. We also estimated that this would significantly increase the overall project execution timeline.

All things considered, we decided to take the plunge. And now we’re here to tell you the story of how things unfolded.

Understanding the Problem Statement

The software robots that we talked about in the introduction are called RPA processes. Our client had multiple RPA processes that they had developed using Blue Prism. Blue Prism, the pioneer of RPA and recent title holder of world’s RPA leader, is one of the best RPA tools to develop processes that combine digital and human intelligence to achieve remarkable outcomes. The benefit of using the software robots is that they perform these tasks faster and more accurately than their human counterparts. What’s more, they don’t get tired like us humans.

These robots or processes are not built with the idea of replacing human workforce. But to eliminate repeatable and time-consuming tasks enabling us to focus our time and mind on tasks that matter — tasks that can’t be emulated by robots, the ones that require thought and creativity.

Through Blue Prism, our client had built, deployed and managed several such processes that interact with different digital applications and perform the pre-defined human-like actions.

Every process developed on Blue Prism has to follow certain standard guidelines and best practices suggested by Blue Prism for higher performance and efficiency of all applications running these processes.

The caveat was each of these processes had to be reviewed manually to check their adherence to the rules, regulations and guidelines defined by Blue Prism. This ate up a large chunk of time of their team as well as caused notable delays.

This problems becomes amplified when operating at a large scale. Now, our client is a well-known and highly successful RPA consulting company with global clientele, which meant they develop and manage hundreds of RPA processes for a host of their clients.

Such a high scale of operation, with several new processes being added and amended across multiple independent and overlapping systems, translated to a huge investment of time and efforts.

Designing the Solution

After gaining complete understanding of the problem we were dealing with, we started designing possible solutions to tackle it. The one we zeroed in on was to build an automated tool that would be programmed to review RPA processes and pull out the ones that did not adhere to the best practices and guidelines prescribed by Blue Prism. Customizing rules and regulations to optimize the output with minimal human intervention would also be the scope of this tool.

Implementation of the Solution

During the implementation of this solution, we ran into a few challenges. When we were testing out this tool that our development team built, our initial struggle was to locate the exact locations of discrepancies within the flagged processes. This resulted in our team spending quite some time finding these locations and then proceeding to fix the issues.

We could not deliver the solution in this state to our client. Time was a major concern for them and they wouldn’t be satisfied with the results. We wanted our solution to work independently and at full throttle to create optimal processes and minimize non-compliances.

But the silver lining was we knew exactly what we were trying to achieve. The challenge was unambiguous.

We spent quite time to learn and understand the process architectures and structures used by our client for their own processes as well as those of their clients’. Our efforts finally paid off.

Now, we had the tool that was capable of performing rich instantaneous analysis of code, while highlighting the exact locations of gaps allowing the developers to fix them effortlessly. They could also add customized guidelines to the existing Blue Prism ones which enabled them to optimize their processes to suit the specific business requirements.

Thus, CodeIQ was born.

Introducing CodeIQ

CodeIQ is an intelligent code review platform that auto scans the Blue Prism release code files to instantly check if it’s in alignment with Blue Prism rules and best practices. It can also check the code files against the customized guidelines and rules, prescribed by the user.

Built using React and Node technology, this application enables our client to track issues quickly and fix them faster, ensuring high performance processes with better code, fewer defects and non-compliance issues. Not only that, it completely streamlines the process review activity with highly actionable reports that make it easy for developers to fix the flagged issues.

This tool could also flag the exact locations of misalignments, so that the development team could easily fix them.

In addition, CodeIQ has the provision to create customized rules and regulations that suit industry best practices, specific company requirements and other quality parameters.

This is how CodeIQ helps our client achieve compliance and meet regulatory requirements, prescribed by Blue Prism as well as their own. The user-friendly interface allows users to easily create custom rules and standards.

Built-in analyzers within the tool enable control measures to guide analysis of code. CodeIQ accomplishes this by providing access to predefined best practices or analyzers.

Yet another feature of CodeIQ is the scalability. CodeIQ can review several processes or code in a single run, making it both scalable and easy to use.

Value delivered by CodeIQ to our client

• Improved delivery quality
• Adherence to Blue Prism best practices
• Adherence to custom company guidelines
• Increased delivery speed
• Reduced ongoing support
• Quicker time to achieve competence
• Code review and analysis for high scale and large volumes of processes
• Minimization of overhead costs

Highlights of the Project

Yes, we delivered what we thought was impossible. We managed to achieve and exceed our client expectations. However, these are some of the key highlights that made this project a huge win for team Seosaph.

• Project Execution Timeline

We complete the entire project right from ideation, solution designing through to implementation, testing and delivery in a record time of 3 months.

• 85% Adherence to Best Practices

Code achieves close to 80-85% adherence to Blue Prism best practices whereas other code review tools offer around 35-50% adherence.

• Solution for large user base

As mentioned above, our client has several clients of their own for whom they have and continue to build Blue Prism processes. Development of CodeIQ solved not only their problem but the problems of their clients as well.

Future Road

As CodeIQ would be of immense use to any company or organization using Blue Prism processes, it’s now being offered as an enterprise license-based product. This has opened new channels of collaboration, partnerships and service offering for our client.

As mentioned above, the goal behind the development of CodeIQ was to save precious human hours. Thanks to CodeIQ, our client’s team could focus on high-value activity. The Automation managers could track quality trends over time and even compare results from different vendors in a multiple-vendor environment, driving them to take well-informed, data-driven business decisions.

As for us, this was yet another opportunity to blend our digital intelligence, technical competence, and aptitude for innovation to develop a valuable solution for our client that’s playing an instrumental role in their growth. And that’s perhaps our biggest achievement from this project!