Analyzing your ServiceNow update set

Before promoting or installing an update set to an instance, it is always good to check first  its quality and what’s actually in it. ServiceNow technical best practices that need to be followed by instance developers are changed quite often – almost for each release.

You can do check the update sets manually and perform a code review by editing the XML file with an XML editor or use the Quality Clouds for ServiceNow free scan tool.

To get your scan token:

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1. Go to https://www.qualityclouds.com/contact/.
2. Type in your email (and a contact name – always welcome), agree to our terms and conditions, and hit Continue.

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We’ll send you a token for a one-off scan of your update set XML. If you don’t receive the email, check the spam folder as some email policies don’t like automated emails.

Summary results

After running the scan, we get a screen summarizing the results:

First thing to be done is to get a visual list of all the elements that the update set contains – to better understand its content.

This list can also be used to plan for the testing that we need to define for this update set:

JavaScript and ServiceNow technical best practices flagged

Then, the free tool checks the technical best practices that are not being followed – according to ServiceNow and JavaScript:

This gives us information about the types of issues found and a link to the official ServiceNow pages that helps to solve each them.

If an update set contains a considerable amount of issues, we might reconsider installing it in the target instance as it could negatively affect it. It could have impact on the following areas:

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• the performance of the instance
• the maintainability of the code (e.g. code duplication, scripts with lots of lines or not well commented)
• the possibility to perform the next upgrade (when out-of-the-box elements are changed)

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Analyzing and sharing your results

Download the results by clicking on the icon on the top right hand (this download an xls file):

Quality Clouds for ServiceNow

Quality Clouds offer a one-off free scan for your update set, and a free 1 month trial for the full product.

We are constantly adding new checks in the tool. If you have any suggestions for what’s critical, let us know by adding a comment below, and we will try to prioritize the requests.  The more you tell us, the more useful the tool will be for you.