Basic Browser Automation - Part 1 of 3 (To automate or not to automate..)
Every statistic points to the known fact that, "We Now Spend More Time on Apps Than PCs".
This may not hold good for those of us who spend most of our day at work. Just like yours, my typical work day ranges between 12 - 14 hours, and a major chunk of that time is spent on a PC navigating business applications on a browser. Firefox (ESR for IBM) is what I prefer.
The kind of work I do requires that I perform a specific sequence of steps multiple times in an hour. The first couple of steps are the same but the rest change depending on what I am trying to achieve.
Those of us who encounter such scenarios when using Excel, turn to Macros. The time invested in recording or writing these macros is a fraction of what we save using them. So why don't we write browser macros? Or was it that everyone else was doing it and I was too late in the game? So I decided to speak to some of my co-workers who are big on efficiency through automation.
What I found was not surprising. Every person I spoke with had thought about browser automation! So the next question was, why did you not pursue the idea? The responses can be categorized into one of the following:
a. I do now know how much time I would take to create one - So ROI was the X factor here
b. I just do not have the time or inclination to learn a new language - Fair enough, we are not developers, we are HR services.
c. I outsourced it to the automation team - Great. So did you get what you wanted? - Yeah! kind of but change requests are a pain.
That got me thinking. Let me ask you netizens. If you have been in such situations, what did you end up doing?
This may not hold good for those of us who spend most of our day at work. Just like yours, my typical work day ranges between 12 - 14 hours, and a major chunk of that time is spent on a PC navigating business applications on a browser. Firefox (ESR for IBM) is what I prefer.
The kind of work I do requires that I perform a specific sequence of steps multiple times in an hour. The first couple of steps are the same but the rest change depending on what I am trying to achieve.
Those of us who encounter such scenarios when using Excel, turn to Macros. The time invested in recording or writing these macros is a fraction of what we save using them. So why don't we write browser macros? Or was it that everyone else was doing it and I was too late in the game? So I decided to speak to some of my co-workers who are big on efficiency through automation.
What I found was not surprising. Every person I spoke with had thought about browser automation! So the next question was, why did you not pursue the idea? The responses can be categorized into one of the following:
a. I do now know how much time I would take to create one - So ROI was the X factor here
b. I just do not have the time or inclination to learn a new language - Fair enough, we are not developers, we are HR services.
c. I outsourced it to the automation team - Great. So did you get what you wanted? - Yeah! kind of but change requests are a pain.
That got me thinking. Let me ask you netizens. If you have been in such situations, what did you end up doing?
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