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Reading time: 4 minutes
Audience: SaaS platform owners; developers; architects; administrators
Code reviews are an essential part of any software development process. They help organisations in identifying bugs or bad practices early in the software development process, therefore preventing bad code to be deployed to the production environment, with the associated user aggravation and impact on the business.
When it comes to SaaS implementations, code reviews are time consuming since the code and configurations are scattered in different places in the platform. So even assuming that you are a top-notch developer in those platforms, it will still take you a while to do the code and configuration reviews. I recently heard of a customer who admitted they could only review 5% of the code generated by their developers.
But why are Salesforce and ServiceNow code reviews so important?
Here is a list of compelling reasons:
– To have defect-free, well-documented instances
– Ensure that software complies with ServiceNow and Salesforce coding and configuration standards
– Teaching and sharing knowledge between developers
– Ensuring the maintainability and scalability of the platform
– In some SaaS platforms, keep your platforms aligned to the out-of-the-box functionality as much as possible by detecting changes in OOB functionality.
Bad SaaS implementations lead to big efforts in code refactoring further down the line, or, in the worst cases, having to throw away all the work done so far. There are plenty of resources in the web about decluttering or refactoring your SaaS. This costs organisation hundreds of thousands of pounds. Additionally costs of upgrades are reduced by a 80% factor (for ServiceNow)
Other reasons for automated code and configuration reviews are:
– to increase security by identifying unsafe connections and hard-coded passwords
– to reduce project time/costs
– strengthen internal audits
– perform GDPR/ Data privacy compliance checks
– generate technical documentation
– identify potential performance bottlenecks before they might become an issue
– but most important, find bugs automatically and with little or no effort!
ServiceNow has built in the platform a code review process which does not any code review per se but facilitates the process of accepting of code before pushing it into the parent instance (learn more here).
Keeping your SaaS in a good health by doing regular health checks is essential to reduce the TCO of your ServiceNow and Salesforce solutions. Having a tool that automatically does code reviews hence becomes a key part of the development process.
Unfortunately, many companies don’t realise about the importance of code reviews until is too late. Start your trial today and see how your SaaS configuration looks like.
