Decision-Making in Robotic Process Automation Programming and its Influence on Robotic Process Mining

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology leverages software bots to automate repetitive tasks within digital environments. While RPA offers significant efficiency gains, current bot programming processes remain heavily manual, requiring extensive effort from developers and domain experts. A current research gap exists in the factors influencing developer decisions during the low-code programming of RPA bots, specifically the choices they make when implementing a selected process. This limited knowledge hinders efforts to automate the bot programming process itself utilizing Robotic Process Mining (RPM) methods. This research study aims to address this knowledge gap by investigating the decision-making of RPA developers. A semi-structured interview study with RPA professionals was conducted to explore the factors influencing developers’ decisions when selecting and translating manual actions into automated processes. The findings from the interview have been the basis to show their implications on RPM tools and to give guidance for the improvement of RPM tools.