Blue Prism Interview Questions and Answers

A software robot that is designed to automate the human interactions with software applications to perform a business process is called Robotic Process Automation. For example, assume there are hundreds of records in an excel sheet, which has to be filled up or copy and pasted into an Online form. This interaction with the application by a human to perform this task can be automated using a software robot. This saves time by automating routine and mundane tasks, thereby increasing productivity

Screen Scraping is a technique where the data displayed by an application on the screen can be captured for processing. This can be carried out using Robotic Process Automation or RPA. But the modern RPA are much more capable of just scrapping the screen. Modern RPA tools can be used completely to automate a business process with analyzing and decision making capabilities. Modern RPA tools have started supporting integration to Machine Learning capabilities to create powerful software robots to carry out complex business processes.

RPA Life cycle starts with the Discovery stage where the requirements are gathered from the client and analyzed for the possibilities of implementing automation. Possible processes for automations are then explored for the next phase. The Solution Phase is where the process is discussed in detail to form a Flowchart for the business process flow. Resources and budget requirements are also finalized during this phase. In the Development Phase, the developer actually starts developing the automation scripts or design using the chosen RPA Tool. For complex automations, the designer can choose to use coding or programming. The Bots are tested for its intended abilities during the User Acceptance Test Stage. The Bots which have passed the UAT test stage are then deployed for actual use by the user which is called the Deployment and maintenance Stage. After all these five stages, users will execute the bots to perform or carry out the automations.

Once the Process is automated, it always results in Accuracy and Consistency as the same tested code is going to execute repeatedly. Hence there is no possibility of errors and the performance remains consistent. Automation reduces the mundane unproductive tasks that were carried out by highly paid human resources and frees up their time for engaging them with more productive jobs, thereby reducing costs and increasing productivity of the existing workforce. Robots can perform the tasks any time of the day or all throughout the day with the same productivity without getting tired when compared to humans. And a very important advantage is, there is no programming or coding required, this enables the normal business users to automate their own simple tasks.

Thin Clients are applications which are executed in a virtual environment like Remote Desktop or Citrix. With virtual environments, identifying or spying the user interface elements such as Buttons, Lists etcetera will be challenging as the screen displays the virtual environment.

Thick Clients are applications which run on the local machines such as Desktop Applications or Applications which runs in a browser. Since the applications are rendered in the local machines, Identifying or Spying the user interface elements will be accurate and reliable. Some people misunderstand the difference of Thin clients as applications which run on a browser, which is incorrect.

Generally there is not much difference in terms of the requirements of RPA either for the Front Office or Back Office Automation. But some RPA Tools require an additional licensing fee equal to the number of users for Front Office RPA implementations. For example, a KPO office with 150 employees might require 150 users licenses to implement automation to be used by every employee.

It is a common misconception that Selenium can be used instead of RPA. Both are completely different tools though both use automation. Selenium is a Software Testing tool which automates the functional testing of a software application using programming languages such as Java, Python or C#. This entire testing happens on a browser environment as Selenium is used to test web applications. Selenium is an Open Source tool. Selenium’s interactions with applications is just not limited to copy and paste of input data. Whereas RPA tools are used to automate business processes by interacting with various application interfaces to perform a task as if how a human user will do. This does not involve any coding or programming.

• The most suitable RPA tool for the project
• Analyze the usage and requirement of Parameters
• Plan and decide on the Testing Environment
• A clear milestones for Project development
• Finalizing the deliverables in phases

RPA tools use visual methods to design the workflow that are required to be defined for automation of tasks. This absolutely requires NO programming knowledge. Any user who knows how to perform his business process can himself automate such tasks using Blue Prism with ease. But for very advanced Users, Blue Prism supports programming language such as C# to automate complex tasks. This option may not be required for most of the RPA developers. These are commonly asked Blue Prism Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

Blue Prism is one of the most preferred RPA tools by the RPA developers. It provides easy to user interface to design and deploy robots to automate any business process tasks. It also supports features to reuse frequently usable steps in multiple projects thereby making re-usable code a possibility to reduce design and development time. Blue Prism provides a high degree of security to store and maintain sensitive information such as the Username and the Passwords which are required to perform certain automations. Blue Prism Offers option to manage robots centrally and it is highly secure and scalable.

All the processes and business objects runs in an Environment in Blue Prism. There are few variables that are declared and maintained in the Environment which will be accessible to all the processes that are running in the Environment. These variables can be used to access common information and states. For example, an Environment Variable can hold a “path” or “folder name” that can be used by various processes or business objects. These Variables are not editable.

Process Studio is the main interface in Blue Prism to model, design and create the process flow for automation. It provides various easy to use flow diagrams and notations that can be used by the developer to visually define and design the workflow.

Blue Prism offers three types of Security; User level Security – used to assign new user information, Security for Credentials – Used to store sensitive data such as username and passwords that are used as part of an automation task, Options – Security or Rules that are defined for setting passwords.

There are two important components in the Blue Prism Interface, The Process Studio and the Object Studio. The Process Studio is used to design and develop automation processes while the Object Studio contains objects that can be used to communicate to external applications from within the process. .

Stages are used to define actions while designing the workflows. For example, Decision Making stage can be used to decide which path the process flow must take to proceed further. The Wait Stage is an important stage which is used to overcome latency during the execution of robots while interaction with various applications. For example, a Wait Stage can be defined in the workflow until a specific web page is loaded fully in the browser before executing the next step.

Blue Prism offers the Win 32 Mode, UI Automation Mode, HTML Mode, Region Mode and the Accessibility Spy Modes.

Control Room has the Session Management Section, Queue Management Section and the Scheduler Section

Application Modeler is where we define the target system with which Blue Prism has to Interact. For example, to fill up the Username and Password in a web application, we will use the Application Modeler to define or capture the elements where the Username and Password data has to be filled.

There are five stages which are unique to the Object Studio and are not available in the Process Studio. They are Read, Write, Navigate, Wait and Code stages. These are commonly asked Blue Prism Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

Front Office Robots are used to automate the User jobs, such as copying and pasting from one application to another. These robots need Human Intervention to activate or trigger the bots which executes under the supervision of humans and are standalone bots. Back Office Robots are executed in the Server Side and do not require human intervention. They are scheduled for executing at specific intervals or on specific events to perform a job.

When a change is made in the Object Layer, this does not affect the Process Layer. This consumes fewer actions at runtime thereby increasing the performance. This helps more developers to work simultaneously.

Surface automation refers to automation using the position of the elements to perform automation. As surface automation uses coordinates to identify or spy elements, this results in low accuracy. If there is a change in the screen design of the application, the surface automation requires changes accordingly which results in huge rework.

Data are exposed using Session Variables and Environment Variables in Blue Prism. The Environment variables are available to all the processes and cannot be changed.

Attach Method is used to connect a running application to a business object. The Attach method throws an error if the application is already connected.

Visual Business Objects are used to interact with the User Interface of External Applications. For example, using the VBO for Excel, it is possible to control the navigation in excel, such as moving the cell, opening a menu and so on, from a Blue Prism robot . A VBO has a Connector that provides a standard library access to communicate with the application and the Application Control Interface which is used to Spy the element of that applications interface.

Process Design Instruction or PDI is a document which acts as a blueprint that is used by Blue Prism Developers to understand the development process in a clear and concise manner.

These are actions which are executed during the start up and end of an object. These are automatically executed and cannot be called exclusively to execute.

Session variables are used to expose data item value during the running of a process. Session variables can be changed in run time. It is to be noted that session variables are specific to that session that is specific to the process. If two instances of the same process are executing, then each process can have the same Session Variable but can hold different values.

Logging Agents are used to automate the process of logging into different applications without manually providing the user id and the password. The user id and password that are required to login to different applications are stored securely. These are commonly asked Blue Prism Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

Internal Business Objects are part of the Blue Prism internals and are installed as a part of the Blue Prism Application itself. There are six internal business objects in total and they are Collections, Credentials, Calendars, Environment Lock, Encryption and Work Queues. These Internal Objections cannot be modified.

When a Child Item is added without a Parent, then it is called Orphan relationship. When a child item starts working without a parent, or a parent item starts working without a child then it is called Broken Relationship.

No, Collection can be added to Environment Variables. Only Text, Data, DateTime, Time, Number, Password, Flag, Binary, Image and Timestamp can be added.

Runtime Resources is a Blue Prism Instance that runs in the background without the need to login manually. This allows executing the Blue Prism process without the need of the Blue Prism Interface.

The scheduler is used to execute processes at specified times and also allows to execute them at specified intervals. Once scheduled, it automatically triggers the process from the background. Scheduler is available in the Control Room.

There are three types of Exceptions in Blue Prism, they are;

Internal Exceptions

System Exceptions and

Business Exceptions

Internal Exceptions are raised by Blue Prism at the time of design of automation workflows. Internal Exception occurs when Blue Prism cannot execute further without a missing information or action. For example, if a file is defined to be open in a process but the path for the file is not given, this raises an Internal Exception as Blue Prism cannot find the file without a path.

System Exceptions are raised when Blue Prism cannot interact with the external application or the external application is accessible. For example, if Blue Prism has to login to an application, but that application cannot be accessed, and then it causes System Exception.

Business Exceptions are caused due to the faulty logic within the automation that is designed. In short, these are business logic failures. Exceptions have to be handled properly in automations.

Startup Parameters are parameters that can be used to pass value before starting a process in Blue Prism. Startup Parameters can also be used to pass data between one page to another page.

If a case needs to be executed or worked in multiple parts but at different times, then it is called Multiple-part Process.

When an exception occurs, an attempt is made to recover from the exception to continue the program flow with an intention that another attempt will resolve the exception scenario. These are commonly asked Blue Prism Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

The Solutions Design Document and the Function Requirements Questionnaire are both documents used to define the automation process and areas of considerations respectively for Blue Prism development projects.

This is a standard process template that is provided by Blue Prism which is designed based on the Best Development Practices while creating a process. The Template provides best practices for Loading and Getting Items from the queue, retrieving items from a database etcetera.

No, Business Exceptions are actually flaws or failures in Business Logic and hence cannot be caught by Blue Prism. For example, if a Negative Value is accepted where Positive Values are expected, then this is a Business Exception which cannot be detected by Blue Prism.

This feature helps to prevent multiple bots which try to access the same path of a process. The environment is locked for a single bot which has a generated token.

Automation using Blue Prism does not require any programming language and anybody can learn and use Blue Prism to automate business processes. Anyhow, to address very advanced and complicated business process problems, Blue Prism allows programmatically solving those tasks. It has Coding Stage where the codes can be written. Blue Prism allows C#, J# and Visual Basic as programming languages to write codes.

Global Send Keys send keystrokes to the active application using a high level interface and are used for applications running in the local system. The Global Send Key Events is a low-level interface which imitates the keyboard keystrokes via the operating system. The Global Send Key Events are highly useful in remote applications such as the remote desktop or Citrix applications. They are also called Thin Clients.

Session variables are declared in objects from inside the process by setting the Exposure option to Session. Environment variables are declared in system level outside of any process or object. They can be set by selecting the Exposure Option to Environment. Environment Variables are not editable.

Data Items are variables which can hold a single value at a time. This can be of different data types such as Number, Image, Date etcetera. Collections are a type of special data item which can store rows of data in a table format. For example, excel sheet data can be stored in Collection.

Blue Prism supports Multi Bot. This can be handled as a single process but by assigning multiple bots to work in parts of the same process. Work Queues can be used to share this work load to multiple robots and execute this single process. This can increase processing speed as well.

Blue Prism follows a cycle for execution. When Immediate Stop is issued from the Control Room, then the current process is Stopped immediately in the current stage of its execution. The Status will be shown as “Terminated” in the Control Room.

When Request Stop is issued from the control room, Blue Prism completes the current cycle of execution and stops the process. The Control Room status will be “Completed”. These are commonly asked Blue Prism Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

Both these objects are used to get data from Excel Workbook File. The difference is the Get Worksheet As Collection object requires parameters while the Get Worksheet As Collection(fast) object does not require any parameter. When a workbook file has multiple sheets and you want to access a specific sheet then you can use the Get Worksheet As Collection Object. You can specify the Workbook Name, Sheet Name as parameters to access the specific Sheet. If a workbook has only one sheet, or you want to access the currently active worksheet in a workbook, then you can use the Get Worksheet As Collection(fast) Object and it copies data from the active sheet.

Surface, here in the sense referred to the device’s screen. The capability to identify an element or read the content from an application’s interface which is displayed on the screen without the intervention of the humans is called Surface Automation. Example being, Identifying the Username and Password textbox, extracting information from applications or websites.

Multiple robots can be assigned to perform part of works to balance the load when performing a huge task or process. When multiple robots work, Work Queues can be used to channelize the way bots access the data in a process. Work Queues are a configurable list which is used by all the Processes to manage their workload.

Control Room acts as a center point from where all the administration of the digital workforce can be done. The digital workforce can be controlled, monitored, executed and scheduled from here.

Tag keywords can be used to group or categorize items in the Work Queues. Tagging an item can be useful for referencing the Item.

Yes, the priority for a Work Queue item can be set while at the time of adding the item to the queue.

In Blue Prism, the objects can be run in the Foreground Mode, Background Mode and an Exclusive Mode.

The Foreground Mode can be used to run an object or process in the foreground. While running a foreground process, in the background another process can be set to run parallely.

The Background Mode can be used to run an object or process in the background. While running a background process, in the foreground another process can be set to run parallely.

The Exclusive Mode, as it name suggests, runs a process Exclusively and no other process can run in the Foreground or Background. These are commonly asked Blue Prism Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

A Log is recorded for all the activities that are done by a robot. The Log can be viewed from the Control Room by selecting the View Log option by right clicking on a session. Logs are useful for troubleshooting. For example, if a robot is terminated, the reason can be interpreted from the Logs.

There are many RPA tools available in the Market. Few of the most popular tools are UI Path, Automation Anywhere, Pega Robotics or OpenSpan, HelpSystems, Kofax, Workfusion.

Operational Impact Documents are used to track the changes that occurs of an automation solution after its implementation.

VBO is Visual Business Objects. These are objects which are used to connect to an external application to perform some action or to access the User Interface of those external applications. Visual Business Objects has to be configured before it can be used in a process. VBO are configured in the Object Studio, but they are used in the Process Studio.

Yes, Blue Prism is a very secure and auditable platform and it has various levels of security and auditable features built in. Security is imposed by creating and providing accessibility to Users. Only authorized users can use Blue Prism. Permissions can be provided to the users to Create, Edit or Run various processes. All the changes of a process are recorded in logs. Also, all the actions of a process are also recorded in logs which can be viewed for auditing purposes.

Dynamic Match is used to provide value for an attribute using the diagram rather than providing a value in the Application Modeler. This can be used when the value of an attribute is unknown or varying.

Exception is handled through three stages in Blue Prism, they are Recovery Stage, Resume Stage and the Exception Stage.

When the unhandled exceptions move upwards and into the Flow only to be caught by the Recovery stage, it is called Exception Bubbling.

The Login Agent is a separate application used by Blue Prism to perform the login process into windows desktop to execute a process. The Login Agent provides secured methods for login.

Priority can be set at the time of when an item is added to a Work Queue. Priority is set for an item to ensure that this item is executed before other processes. Once the priority is set, it cannot be changed while it is already added to the Queue.

They are used to store the value of a data item in the database. This is used for reporting purposes. These are commonly asked Blue Prism Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

Excel can be accessed by configuring and using the MS Excel VBO Object from the Object Studio.

Since Blue Prism uses designs to define the automation workflow, there is an option to create and use multiple pages in a process. Page references can be used to refer to different pages inside an object or process.

Write Stage is used to get input from the users in a process. For example, the Write stage can be used in the process workflow to get input such as the user name or password.

While interaction with external applications, there can be slight delays or latency until the external application responds or its User Interface is loaded. The Wait Stage can be used to make the business object to wait until it gets the desired response or until the required User Interface element is loaded before preceding the process.

The debugging techniques are Step, Step Over and Step Out.

Handling Exceptions, Managing work queues properly, Using the Wait Stage appropriately to ensure smooth execution of process, using the Anchor stage appropriately.

The Process is the definition and collection of all the logical elements to perform an automation. This is designed or developed using the Process Studio.

The Important components of the Blue Prism Interface are the Home Tab, Studio Tab, Control Room, Analytics, Releases and the System Tab.

When the fields are configured in a collection before running the process, it is called the Defined Allocations. When they are set in run time, they are called Undefined Allocations.

If a variable is accessible from all the pages it is called as Global Variables. When variables are accessible only within the page, then they are called as Local Variables. These are commonly asked Blue Prism Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

No, Nest Blocks are not allowed in Blue Prism

The Alt key can be used to change the Spy Mode in Blue Prism and Pressing the Alt key cycles through the various Spy Modes.

The Control+Right Click hot keys can be used to Exit the Spy Mode

The Process Information Page is used to publish the process to the control room. It is also used to enable or disable stage logging.

Yes, Javascript can be invoked from the Navigate Stage.

There will be only one Start Stage. But there can be multiple End Stage depending upon the process.

Yes, the Work Queue can be paused temporarily using the Queue management Option from the Control Room.

Queue Manager is used to manage the Work Queue

The IsStopRequest() environment function can be used to configure safe stops. This is available from the Decision Stage.

Connectors are used to handle the low level interactions of the applications interface. AS there are plenty of applications available, such as Java Applications, Windows Applications etcetera, there are many connectors available in Blue Prism. HTML Connector, Windows Connector, Java Connector, Mainframe Connector and the Citrix Connector are some of the examples for connectors.

Usually the items in the Queue are served in the First In First Out – FIFO order. But for some reasons, if you want to not execute an item from a queue, then applying Defer Queue will differ that item from being picked for execution. These are commonly asked Blue Prism Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

Blue Prism uses the MS Sql Server database to store and retrieve Software Robots.

The Region mode is used in Surface Automation. It is easy to Spy Elements in the Thick Clients that are applications that are running in a local computer. But it is difficult to Spy elements in the Thin Client environment such as Remote Desktop or Citrix Environment. Since spying an element in Thin Clients is difficult, elements can be captured and mapped by selecting a rectangular region on the screen where the elements are displayed.

OCR is Optical Character Recognition. This technology is used to capture elements that are read inputs from Images or handwritten documents.

Release Manager is used to preserve configurations across different blue prism environments. Using Release Manager the configuration packages can be imported and exported between different blue prism environments.

In Release Manager, users can create checklists and this checklist is called Output.

Instead of using the attribute value in Application Modeller, Wildcard Match Type is used to select value from the Diagram.

All the Items in the Work Queues are updated with a status. This can be used to identify what work is done by those Items. Use the Update Status Action to update the status of items.

This is used to encrypt the sensitive data to the Blue Prism Database that is held within the queue.

The Pause option can be used to Pause the Work Queue temporarily. When during the Pause, the items are not released for processing. The Resume Function is used to reactivate the queue and release the Pause

While the item is created, empty fields can be provided. This provides storage for the data that are collected while the item is working. These are commonly asked RPA Developer Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

To generate the Management Information or MI, Queue data is used to measure the performance of the process.