Blue Prism Solution Designer (ASD01) Interview Questions

The Blue Prism is the best and highly demanded application for creating automation solution manuals owing to the wide range of elements and functions you get to choose from. Getting certified as a Blue Prism Solution Designer (ASD01) will therefore give your career a boost, and expand your job opportunities.  The interviewer will be interested in knowing how you approach process design. To make sure you are the right fit for their company, they will ask you to demonstrate your understanding of creating automation, using sub-processes, and creating wrappers. Recovery and scalability are important considerations as well. Essentially, they’ll examine your expertise in designs that use cases efficiently, enable workload management, and provide for good data management. Additionally, your knowledge in web service integration will also be tested. 

It goes without saying that you don’t want to be caught off-guard. You want to be prepared, and be able to articulate how your skills overpower that of other candidates. So here is a list of the top Blue Prism Solution Designer (ASD01) Interview Questions, to help you excel. Let’s have a look!

1. Can you outline the working of RPA?

The Robotic process automation working involves four core stages: 

1. Planning – here, the processes that are to be automated are defined. These include identifying the test objects, then finalizing the approach for implementation approach, and finally deciding a clear roadmap for the final RPA implementation
2. Design and development – Once the plan for your integration is in place, you can start designing and developing the automation workflows.
3. Deploying and testing – To ensure accurate functioning, bots must be tested to ensure there are no bugs or errors. Here, any such unexpected outages are handled during the deployment.
4. Support and maintenance – Providing continuous support allows us to better identify and help rectify any errors.

2. Can you identify the major distinction between traditional automation and RPA?

Traditional automation is the process of manually integrating distinct software systems by reliance on a set of programming interfaces (APIs) and other tools. It is more common for a developer to have a good understanding of the target system.

Whereas, robotic process automation replicates user actions at the user interface (UI) level. As long as it sticks to the steps, the developer can ignore the underlying complexities.

3. As a Blue Prism Solution Designer (ASD01) can you highlight some features of RPA?

• Rich analytical suite – The rich suite of analytics available helps you to monitor and manage your automated functions. You can view basic metrics on robots, servers, workflows, and more from anywhere.
• Simple creation of bots – RPA tools easily enable the creation of bots when you record your mouse clicks and keystrokes with built-in screen recorder components
• Scriptless automation – RPA tools can automate any application in any department, and you don’t even need to be an expert programmer.
• Security – RPA tools allow a company to encrypt certain data types, and defend against the interruption of communication on its network.
• Hosting and deployment – RPA systems can automatically deploy hundreds of bots to perform repetitive tasks. To do this, RPA bots are installed on desktops and servers.
• Debugging – Some tools for automation must be stopped and restarted to  fix errors, while others allow the programmer to dynamically interact with the process while debugging. This dynamic interaction feature is one of the most powerful parts of RPA.

4. What do you mean by Citrix automation? 

Citrix automation is any such solution used in virtual desktops and built to work within them. It’s used in businesses like small- to large-scale BPOs, contact centers, and others to allow remote access because of security concerns.

5. Can you name the tools used in RPA?

Some of the popular RPA tools include: 

• UiPath
• Blue Prism
• Automation Anywhere
• Workfusion
• Redwood

6. How would you explain Wrapper Classes?

A wrapper class is one that wraps around another class or data type to give it an object appearance. It can be used wherever that original class or type can be used. It also includes methods to unwrap the object and return the original class or type.

There are eight types of wrapper classes available:

• Byte 
• Short  
• Integer  
• Long  
• Float  
• Double  
• Character  
• Boolean

7. Is Autoboxing And Unboxing the same thing?

The Java compiler automatically converts between the primitive types and their respective wrapper classes. For example, an int is automatically converted to an Integer, a double is automatically converted to a Double, and so on. If the conversion goes the other way—that is, from wrapper class to primitive type—this process is called unboxing.

8. Is caching supported by all wrapper classes?

Yes, all of them support Autoboxing and Auto-unboxing. Unlike Integer, they have limited cache sizes for Autoboxing and Auto-unboxing, upto 127.

9. Why is RPA scalability important?

RPA scalability means that you can easily use RPA across multiple business units. RPA can be scaled and expanded to work in more parts of the business. For example, you might start to use automation by tackling one part of your business process, then take a look at other areas and processes. You could even make RPA available to different departments or office locations.

10. In what type of environment will you implement RPA?

The utility of RPA automation is vast. It is inclusive of automating the workflow, infrastructure, and back-office processes which are labor-intensive. Further, these software bots are even interactive with an in-house application, website, user portal, etc. 

11. As a Blue Prism Solution Designer (ASD01) what according to you are the factors that clients consider when employing RPA? 

There are several factors. The most important ones are: 

• Customer Expectation
• Reduction of Operational Costs
• Regulatory Compliance
• X-Factor

12. Which processes would be suitable for RPA?

RPA is a technology best used for processes that are frequent, not yearly or monthly. Processes with high transaction volumes and manual input that occur frequently, such as daily or weekly, are good candidates for robotic process automation.

13. How is RPA flexible?

RPA is both flexible and adaptable. 

RPA mimics human actions, which means it won’t require any time-consuming programming for you to automate your business processes. It is one of the fastest-growing areas in the industry. It’s also perhaps one of the simplest to get started with.

14. What is the purpose of an object studio in Blue Prism?

Object Studio in Blue Prism can be used to build different objects. Object Studio is where you create your Visual Business Object (VBO), which will allow you to interact with other applications, by providing a familiar flow chart interface, similar to the one used in Process Studio.

15. Blue Prism employs which language?

Blue Prism is a software tool that consists of software robots to help enterprises automate processes in an agile and cost-effective manner. This software uses Java, a programming language, and allows for a visual designer with drag and drop functionalities.

16. Can you mention the different security types in Blue Prism?

There are mainly three different security types:

• User: It assigns new user information
• Credentials: It stores secret information
• Options: It assigns rules to set passwords

17. Which spying modes do you have in Blueprism?  Are there combinations that you can use?

Essentially, there are four spying modes in Blue Prism:

1. Html Mode
2. Win32 mode
3. Accessibility Mode
4. Region Mode

Depending upon the applications of these spying modes in an element tree, their combination is possible.

18. What does a framework in Blue Prism consist of? 

The Blue Prism framework includes the technical infrastructure (security and governance), and the operating model (process management, delivery management, and operational support).

19. What templates the delivery roadmap use?

The delivery roadmap utilizes seven Blue Prism templates: 

• Initial Process Analysis (IPA)
• Process Definition Document (PDD)
• Functional Requirement Questionnaire (FRQ)
• Solution Design Document (SDD)
• Operational Impact Document (OID)
• Process Design Instruction (PDI)
• Object Design Instruction (ODI)

20. What is Accessibility Mode and how does it work? How do I switch between them?

The Accessing mode is nothing but a spying mode similar to Win32 and HTML. It is basically an interface that is originally created for the purpose of screen reading and speaking applications in order to assist Windows application users with disabilities. That is, for changing to accessibility by simply pressing the “ALT” key until the spy tool turns blue in color.

21. When using Get Table, why is the content of the table not read properly? Can you suggest any possible solution for it?

This problem is probably because the values that are held within the HTML code are not stored directly into the table tags. This is because more HTML code is held within the table cell. For instance:  <td><div>data</div></td>

Further, if the Get Table isn’t working then you can try reading the HTML code of that table and using string manipulation for extracting the values. Another possible solution is using counters for every row and column and reading every cell individually.

22. What is the best way for handling Pop-up windows?f

By creating a separate business object to interface with the popup window.

23.  Does the ‘Parent URL’ option in the application modeler need to be checked or unchecked and why?

To avoid errors that may occur when the parent URL of a speed element changes, the best way is to un-tick the Match column for that attribute in Application Modeller.

24. Can you name the run modes?

Three run modes are:

• Foreground, Background, and Exclusive

25.  Why do we use work queues in blue prism?

Work queues let you model the queueing, locking, and reporting of work items. A work queue contains a number of work items that your session can lock and run within an object or process. You can view and manage the work queues from the Work Queues business object.

26. What is the purpose of session variables?

Session variables are dynamic variables that exist only during a user’s session with your application; they are specific to each visitor to your site. Also, they can include things like what that user has looked at, or how much time they have spent on your site. They store information specific to each visitor.

27. In what ways can Blue Prism Professional services be helpful?

Blue Prism offers a wide range of services from mentoring and supporting with quick delivery via automation. It assures delivering benefits of business at agreed levels. For example, if you want a robotic platform to automate your home, you can rely on Blue Prism to deliver the benefits of business at agreed levels.

28. How well do you know Blue prism’s web service?

Blue Prism supports third-party web services so that other applications and developers can use Business Objects and business processes within Blue Prism:

• For interacting with the already automated legacy systems by Blue Prism
• Secondly, for adding the work items to suitable queues that are ready for processing based upon the pre-determined schedule
• Also, triggering the processing of work items immediately by Blue Prism (subject to resource availability)
• Then, retrieving data from the systems Blue Prism automates
• Further, retrieving information from Blue Prism including details of work queues, schedules, work history, etc.
• Finally, Blue Prism Business Objects and Processes to interact with 3rd party systems by the use of published web services

29. Can you highlight the benefits of allowing third-party systems or developers to interact with Blue Prism?

• Allowing third-party systems to interact with Blue Prism simplifies the process by enforcing the rules that are built into the platform. Also, it removes the need for developers to manually modify the rules that are followed by each system. Further, all changes to processes and actions are managed and controlled remotely using the visual designer(s) by the appropriate team members.

30. Which items must be reviewed to allow access to Blue Prism web services?

The following items must validate before access can grant to Blue Prism web services:

• Firstly, network connectivity to Blue Prism runtime resources
• Then, security permissions to interact with the web services 
• Finally, web service definition (WSDL)