Surface Automation is not preferred by many organizations, any thing else we should be following?

[Sri_Krishna_Cha]

Surface Automation is time consuming and not reliable. This is the statement I am hearing while discussing and especially this is not that easy like a HTML or Windows spying techniques. Is there a better way of doing automation of Citrix applications, I believe there is none from all the documents that I have gone through.. is there anything else all BP developers are following right now and is there anything that Blue Prism is having in their plan ? I know that in BP 6 they made it little easy but again that is not that easy like what I think it would be.. 

[BastiaanBezemer]

Surface Automation is indeed time consuming to develop well. But if designed well, it is fully reliable 

[Denis__Dennehy]

Bastiaan is correct - Surface Automation if built in accordance with training should be just as reliable as any other interface.  From my experience unreliable SA interfaces when looked at will totally disregard a number of key lessons such as image recognition, tiny waits after activates or focus events, etc.  Poor interfaces will only use blind coordinates, good interfaces will use image recognition to find elements. I know of one SA interface at a client which was running for many years - as reliable as any other interface. For speed - it is slow, especially for new users.  One partner was taking 40 days per process to delivery but that was cut down to 7 days once they had got used to using Surface Automation and were designing their solutions well to be able to gain from object re-use.  V6 is a big improvement because a lot of the best practices many developers used to ignore are now built into the product.

[DavidEdwards-Da]

As above, much slower than the other modes of automation but can be built to be reliable.  It does put more responsibiltiy on you as the developer to think about many things including your remote viewing tool (does it change the resolution when you connect?), does some other app that you're not automating randomly throw up a toastie notification that blocks where you need to find information? Also don't forget the other part of an automation journey besides the actual development - keeping IT across everything that is happening. Is there the possibiliy that your resource machine can sit in the citrix environment, so that it can use the other modes of integration?

[Anonymous]

I used surface automation last year for a project and the process runs each day for a few hours without exception.  Really pleased with it but I did have to really think about the most efficient process steps to use (which were not the ones humans used) and how best to interact for robust results.   My biggest fear are changes to the application - I made a mistake of automating one of the applications without setting the screen to maximum. It has been fine for 6 months then customer changed the size of the application window (and removed all my default settings and ability to save the size as a default) so now my images are mismatched and need reworking (doh!).  The core of my process is still ticking over like clockwork. I do however have a projecting coming up where it appears everything including excel/network drives are inside an Azore RDP virtual desktop.  Can I have blueprism inside this and still connect it to my normal control room    I would like direct access to the drive and excel for fast VBO tools (so either need that drive access given to my VM or failing that have Blueprism inside Azore as the VM connected to control room).  My projects so far have always had thick client / direct access to drives and/or used surface automation for thin clients pulling data back to the local machine.