Audience: SaaS responsible; DevOps teams; Software Architects; Salesforce admins and developers; ServiceNow admins and developers
Reading time: 7 minutes
Introduction
Jenkins, the leading open source Continuous Integration system, is well known for its rich plugin ecosystem.
Plugins allow Jenkins its extension to implement DevOps pipelines across a wide variety of IT systems.
With the publication of the Quality Clouds plugin for Jenkins, it is now possible for Quality Clouds customers to integrate analysis of their ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Office 365 platforms into their Continuous Delivery pipelines.
Therefore the Quality and Governance controls which Quality Clouds enables in these SaaS platforms can be included as part of a DevOps process.
How does it work?
The Quality Clouds plugin for Jenkins allows the definition of Scan steps in a Jenkins Job. These steps will trigger a scan on any target instance through the Quality Clouds API. The step is parametrised to mark the build as a success or failure depending on the main KPIs calculated by the scan:
– Quality of Cloud
– Technical Debt
– Total number of Issues
– Total number of High Severity issues
This means that we get real time feedback about the status of our SaaS instance as in a way which seamlessly integrated with our development and configuration activities.
Together with the regular scheduled scans which run on a weekly or daily basis and the online checks (for ServiceNow only) the plugin helps Quality Clouds customers ensure that the Quality of their cloud deployments stay under control at all times.
How do I start?
The plugin is available for customers of the Enterprise edition. It does not count from the number of available full scans. It runs with any desired frequency (daily, hourly, or even on every commit).
Besides that, the plugin is available from the standard Jenkins plugin repository, and should appear on the Update Manager window as an available plugin.
Once installed, configuration is very simple. All that requires is to add a “Quality Clouds Scan” step in a free-form Jenkins project, and then fill in the step configuration parameters:
– the URL of the instance to analize
– one of the thresholds which will mark the build as failed
Since the plugin leverages the Quality Clouds API functionality, an API key will be made available to you during your onboarding as a Quality Clouds enterprise customer. This key must is then configured as a Jenkins credential, which is then the reference for the Job configuration on the Quality Clouds Scan step.
Detailed instructions on how to do this are available at our docs site
In summary, the main advantages of using the Quality Clouds Jenkins plugin are:
1 – Get quick feedback on the quality of your SaaS platform, leveraging Jenkin’s functionality to schedule and trigger builds, and to report on build failure / success.
2 – Integrate Quality Clouds scans with development activity, by triggering a scan based on events on any of your development repositories.
3 – Include verification of your SaaS development activities into DevOps / Continuous Integration processes driven by Jenkins.
Try Quality Clouds today for 15 days . Include DevOps into your ServiceNow and Salesforce development cycle with ease!