Bot Lifecycle Management

The Bot Lifecycle Management feature enables you to move a bot from one environment to another. For example, you can move a bot from the development or testing environment to the production environment.

Overview

Bot Lifecycle Management easily integrates with the DevOps workflow, which supports separate development, testing, acceptance, and production environments and enables you to move bots along with their dashboards from one environment to another.

Bot Lifecycle Management provides a framework for continuous testing and deployment of bots and their dependencies in separate software development life cycle (SDLC) environments, allowing bots to seamlessly transition between lifecycle stages defined by an organization before they are released to production.

You can use the feature to move bots within different environments and help you prevent failure or disruption of data. You have to export a bot from one environment and then import it to another environment to move it between environments. You can also bundle all the dependencies of a bot when transitioning it through the different environments.

The following image shows a typical Bot Lifecycle Management workflow:

Bot Lifecycle Management overview diagram

What is exported across environments

The following entities are included when you perform an export operation from one Control Room to another:

Bot files
Dependent files
Action packages and dependencies
Bot Insight dashboards

The following entities are not included when you perform an export from one Control Room to another:

Credentials and credential lockers
Workload management queues
Bot Runner accounts and permissions

Permissions required to export and import bots

To export bots from the Control Room, you must have the following permissions:

Export bot and View packages feature permissions
Check in or Check out folder permissions

To import bots to the Control Room, you must have the following permissions:

Import bot and Manage package feature permissions
Check in folder permission

Importing Enterprise 11 bots when migrating to Automation 360

You can import your Enterprise 11 bots from the Enterprise 11 Control Room instance to Automation 360. This method enables you to consolidate the Enterprise 11 bots from multiple Control Room repositories to a single Automation 360 repository. After importing the bots to Automation 360, use the Bot Migration Wizard to convert the bots to the Automation 360 supported format (.bot).

Modes to import and export bots

You can use one of the following two modes to import and export bots across different Control Room instances. Choose a method that best suits your environment and requirements.

Manual mode: Involves exporting and importing bots using the user interface.; Export bots | Import bots
Automated mode: Involves exporting and importing bots using Control Room APIs.; BLM API

Moving a bot

To move a bot from one environment to another, follow these steps:

Export the bot from the Control Room in the source environment.
Import the bot into the Control Room in the destination environment.