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 or use the promote bot feature 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 move bots across environments

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
To promote botsacross environments you must have the following permissions:
  • Export bot for the user performing the bot promotion in the source Control Room
  • All folder level permissions (Run and schedule, Check in, Check out, View content, Clone, and Delete from Public) on the folders containing the bots which you want to promote in the source Control Room.
  • The target Control Room user must have Import bots 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 move bots across environments

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

Manual mode
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, use one of the following options:
  • Export and import bot
    1. Export the bot from the Control Room in the source environment.
    2. Import the bot into the Control Room in the destination environment.
  • Promote bot
Note: You cannot copy a bot to a shared folder to move them between different Control Room environments. You must use either the export and import, or the promote bot feature to move bots across environments.