Work Queues - To use or not to use - Best Practice

[RickBurrows]

My team has been having a discussion about work queues….to use or not to use?

 There are many benefits to using these queues when working through several items of data that are processed in the same manner.  However there are use cases out there that do not require the processing of repetitive input.  I'm working on a process like this at the moment.  This process simply goes to an application, clicks a few buttons to download a couple of reports, massages the data in these to reports to come up with another report which is saved to an accessible location for later use by the end users.

To me, using queue processing adds to the complexity of the process.  Using the queue for a single work item (not even sure what that item would be in my use case) would seemingly consume BP resources unnecessarily.  We are wondering if there are any technical implications around queue usage (or not) around logging, database, future BP releases or whatever that should be considered?  There doesn't seem to be much online regarding best practice in terms of using a queue or not. 

Again, using work queues is great when the use case calls for it, but what if it does not.   Your thoughts?

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Rick
Principal Software Developer
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[Denis__Dennehy]

Ok - as one of the guys who wrote the rule book on Work Queues you can think of me as "The Work Queue Police"!  I'd say always, always, (did I say always?), always use a work queue where your solution does case work (repeats similar steps for a number of different work items).  Even if you are using something else to manage your work (i.e. a workflow system elsewhere) the Blue Prism workqueue is what allows you to ensure your solution is designed for multiple robots instead of just one (even if that is just-in-case robustness), it allows you to see/report/analyse actual case time for work in Blue Prism rather than just having start and end time of a process, as Robin says a Work Queue when used well - with status updates to know how far in a work item the robot has worked - allows for robustness in case disaster happens and for your solution to be designed to skip steps that have already been worked if needed.