The Automation Anywhere Bot Games Event kicked off the Imagine New York 2018 event. The Bot Games provided a platform for like-minded Automation Anywhere customers and developers to come together to participate, compete and network to drive innovation with the company’s latest RPA tools. The main competitions of the Bot Games were broken into three categories; the Genius Bot Challenge, Bot Wars, and the RPA Business Challenge. I was lucky enough to participate in two of the challenges.
Genius Bot Challenge: This competition challenged developers to submit a pre-built bot to be graded on creativity, comprehensiveness, resiliency and reusability. The winner was an RPA bot that monitored an RPA team's mailbox for trigger emails and automated tasks like scheduling and configuring in the center of excellence. The runner-up was a re-useable Microsoft Excel metabot that allows developers to take advantage of EVERY action available in Excel and use it in any of their Automation Anywhere bots, such as formatting options or pivot table controls. These reusable bots will be available to all Automation Anywhere customers through the recently announced Bot Store in the next few weeks.
Bot Wars Challenge: This challenge was a goal-oriented challenge with a two-hour time limit; the developer with the most points earned wins. Developers earned points by creating a bot that successfully performed tasks with three increasing levels of difficulty. An application calculated the points by evaluating the accuracy of the bot interaction and the speed at which it could accomplish the task. This competition was less about making robust code or using center of excellence best practices, and more about accomplishing a goal within a demanding deadline. The best developers in this challenge were those that were familiar with Automation Anywhere, could handle pressure and were adept at advanced problem solving. Of the 40-50 developers on site, many were able to score points in the first and second level of difficulty. Only a few were able to score points in the third level, and none were able to complete all three levels of difficulty with 100 percent accuracy. It was a tough test of developer mettle.
Overall, these challenges were a fun way for developers to showcase their creativity and skillsets. The best advantage of attending in person was getting to meet like-minded RPA users and consumers and hearing about their successes and challenges. As a side note, Automation Anywhere also sent the winners of each challenge to Las Vegas!
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About the author
Don is a Senior Consultant in ISG’S Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Practice. Don brings more than 13 years of experience in process automation, agile development, solution architecting, IT infrastructure tool integration, coding, debugging and troubleshooting in technology and automated solutions. Previously, Don was a Senior Tools Engineer at American Insurance Group (AIG) and was responsible for the analysis, integration and upkeep of new technology software into multiple global data center environments containing more than 30,000+ virtual servers. In addition to new tool integration, Don also designed and developed custom automated solutions using agile development methodologies to minimize turnaround time and resource needs.
