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Audience: Architects and developers
The out-of-the-box rulesets included in Quality Clouds for ServiceNow and Quality Clouds for Salesforce allow our customers to control the quality of their SaaS deployments. They ensure that any change or customization is implemented according to the platform vendor’s recommended best practices.
In addition to this, defining your company’s custom ruleset for Quality Clouds is one of the most powerful features of our product. This key feature efficiently allows our enterprise license customers to verify that the guidelines and standards which they specify should be followed on their developments and customizations on their Cloud Platforms are indeed adhered to by all developers.
What types of rules can I create?
There are different types of guidelines, which can be grouped into the following categories:
– Naming standards: These can be of various kinds but are usually applied to the names of Configuration Elements, tables, or columns. They can also be used to easily tell the different vendor’s activities apart by enforcing a descriptive prefix for each vendor team. In addition, they can be used to ensure that geographically distributed teams, each with a different native language, are limited to a common set of permissible characters for the names of all the Configuration Elements.
– Architectural guidelines: It is common for architecture teams to designate guidelines regarding the structure of the code and data structures that support it. These can be expressed in terms of custom rules, which calculate code metrics, for example; the number of lines of code, the ratio of lines of code to comments, and cyclomatic complexity (for Apex code only). It is also possible to be warned about excessive customization of your Cloud Platform’s default data objects, tables and columns being created outside of your defined parameters in terms of numbers of columns, NULL values allowed, and more.
– Change control: It is possible to define Custom Rules that generate issues whenever a certain functionality is modified within a specific time frame. This allows you to ensure that a freeze on sensitive functionality is respected.
– Exploratory analysis: Ever wonder whether any legacy or soon to be deprecated API is present in your code? Setting up a custom rule that reports on each instance of the API being used will give you an overall vision of your current situation. With each successive scan, you will be able to track your goal of removing the dependency, and ensuring that it does not get introduced again.
How do I create a custom rule?
To define a Custom Rule, you only need to send a support ticket with a description of your requirements to help [at] www.qualityclouds.com. Unless these are particularly complex, one should be able to implement them with configuration changes only In this particular case, you can expect your custom rule to be deployed to our test environment within three days. We usually recommend running at least one custom scan from our pre-production environment to validate the results and make any necessary adjustments.
Remember that you can specify all parameters which define a custom rule, severity, time to fix (contribution to Technical Debt), and a URL link to the corresponding documentation pages to facilitate your team of developers with the proper context to help them generate better quality code.
It should be noted as well that severity level can be manually set to WARNING. This can be useful if you expect many violations of any custom rule and do not want them to affect the Quality of Cloud, Technical Debt, and Number of Issues metrics.
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