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Join our Webinar on Quality Gates
Discover how to set realistic goals for understanding technical debt and controlling updates. Find out how your business can improve ServiceNow configuration governance with quality gates.
Join our Customer Success Manager, Taher Dahodwala to find out more on Thursday, 9th December at 4pm GMT.
How can your Business Improve ServiceNow Configuration Governance?
ServiceNow is designed to be flexible, which is what makes it useful to businesses. The downside is that platform development moves so fast that code or business functions which were developed a few years ago, may no longer conform to best practices.
This can lead to issues that affect the end user like HR trying to use the application for creating new forms or the end-user wanting to add new information, but as they do so, the system breaks. For example, it may be taking 30-40 seconds to load a page, or 2 minutes for a form. They see that it is slower than usual and report this back to the IT team. Speed is the tangible outcome, but often there are other issues too.
For the CTO or systems architect this may highlight other issues with the system. A poorly functioning system may also have problems with security, manageability and be difficult to scale. Over the time, as the company has built on its Service Now platform, technical debt will have built up; apps, business functions and customisations of out-of-the-box technology all pile up. It can be difficult for the IT team to manage. It’s hard to manually review thousands of lines of code and catch all the violations or issues.
How do Quality Gates Improve ServiceNow Configuration?
Adding a gate function will put a quality check on the code being committed. Every time you push an update set to the ServiceNow platform, it runs a live check against the code and displays the violations, if any, for the developer to review. When the Quality Gates pass, the update set can be moved to complete status.
We work with clients in two ways to prevent new issues; create a baseline and transition. Here’s how to prevent new issues in ServiceNow with quality gates, whatever stage your business is at:
Creating a baseline to improve configuration
A ServiceNow system that has been running for 3-4 years is fairly new, but could be about to start seeing tangible issues. A 3-year-old system is likely to have 700+ hours of technical debt. This is where Quality Clouds recommends a baseline. We put a control in place to restrict further medium to high risk code, configuration or policy violations. This means that the business needs to either go back and fix the issues, fix those that are vital, or write it off completely and move forward.
Transitioning to a healthy instance to improve configuration governance
If your ServiceNow system has been running for over five years, you may need to transition. After about ten years, a business can have around 2000+ hours of technical debt (70,000+ lines of code). We have a few clients which are currently transitioning from the legacy instance to a healthy instance. To do this we have to test the legacy system for quality. We put in quality gates to check for any code/application that is migrating to the new system. If the quality check shows there are any high/medium severity issues, the gates fail and ask the developer to review and fix it. Only once it is clean is it allowed to migrate.
Who Should Use Quality Gates?
Using quality gates to prevent new issues in Service Now is not a challenge that is confined to one sector or type of business. We work with everything from banking, manufacturers, tech firms; any company that’s been using ServiceNow as a core platform.
What Can Your Business Do First to Improve ServiceNow Configuration Governance?
It can all be managed, but it is important to work out what you have first. You can then set realistic goals to understand your technical debt. Quality Clouds can put a system in place to measure and control new code, configurations and policies. At this point most businesses put in a task force to deal with legacy issues to improve configuration in their ServiceNow platform with quality gates.
To find out more about how Quality Clouds can help your company, join our webinar on Thursday, 9th December at 4pm BST, with our Customer Success Manager, Taher Dahodwala.
