What am I supposed to Automate?

Recently Qlik introduced Application Automation. But like anything new, a lot of people are saying "Ok. Looks cool. But what am I supposed to Automate?"

In an interview yesterday I jokingly referred to a mindless task I have to do every single day that drives me crazy and simply takes up my time. It's needed. But it's mindless work. Opening and taking several vitamins each and every morning.

Today I was confronted with a task that was just as mindless, to me, but critical for the organization. There is a team in our organization building an application and their measurements are considered the "gold standard." I, and several others, are also building different applications, from the same base data and are tasked with "matching their formulas." To be clear, I only use their expression as the basis for mine which needs some customizations. But whenever they add new text values that have to be considered, I also need to add them. Which wouldn't be a big deal, at all, if their team were finished with their formulas months ago. But they are still actively working on their application. Like hourly.

Yikes! That's kind of a no win situation. Right? "Dalton you need to go open up the vitamins, I mean their application, multiple times per day, and check a really important KPI formula to see if it was modified from what you last thought it was." Sure we want to be agile, but there are limits. I mean c'mon there are soooo many better things that I could use my mind for than that. But what are the options? The numbers have to be correct so this mindless task has to be completed.

This my friends is a perfect task to use Qlik Application Automation for. So that's what I did. I created a task that would read this vital KPI definition from their application, store it in a variable, then read the last known definition which I based my customizations on from my application. Then I simply used a conditional to compare the two definitions.

Finally, if they don't match I send myself an email so I'm alerted to their change. One important heads up for those who are Qlikkies, do not send an expression that contains Set Analysis in it, as HTML. I might have learned that the hard way.

Opening vitamins in the morning may be something I will have to continue doing, I simply can't afford to purchase a real robot to do that for me. Yet.

However, dealing with the stress/doubt/worry about another team making changes that I will have to mimic isn't. I can't afford not to use Qlik Application Automation for this. My automation runs hourly and I get a handy dandy email message so I know I need to update my application.

Hey wait a minute, you are right! I need to send myself the URL for my application, and my variable so I can just click it from the email. Great suggestion. Y'all are really getting this automation stuff. Great tip! 🤖