Understanding your automation task

The purpose of using software robots is to make our life easier by freeing up valuable time. In this section, we will outline the manual process that will be used for our first bot. Mapping a step-by-step process of the manual task is known as a user story. This bot will execute the process end to end automatically. We will start by drafting a quick user story of this task.

This bot is based on a manual task performed by John, who works within a loans department of a finance company. The process executes as follows:

1. John creates a new empty CSV file called Chapter05_Output.csv.
2. A daily CSV file is available on a shared drive, Chapter05_Input.csv.
3. John will open this file and read each record. This record has the following fields: Reference, Amount, Years, and Interest.
4. John calculates the monthly payment by using the following formula: (Amount + Interest)/ (Years x 12).
5. John adds a record for each calculation in the new...