Here’s how Quality Clouds can help your Update Set Consolidation. Gain control and ensure a smooth release with one single view of your changes.
As I mentioned in the previous blog on this subject, Update Set Consolidation in ServiceNow can get complicated. You can imagine having a simple update package to move around might be easy for more advanced ServiceNow users. But, what if you are working on a project around the globe and with complex delivery processes? You’d better be a management magician or you will go crazy moving Update Sets from one instance to another.
Or let’s say you have many developers working on the same features at the same time. Are they going to use the same Update Set to record their work? Are you going to have several update sets at the same time and merge them all before promotion? ServiceNow allows you to merge Update Sets in a very effective way (even though you can get clashes while merging). That said, merging affects your capacity to identify the origin of any potential issue that may arise in the future.
How can Quality Clouds help?
Quality Clouds delivers several ways to help with Update Set and Release Management:
Update Set Live Check:
With Quality Clouds Live Check, you can make sure that the stuff you are promoting is in pristine condition. Evaluate your Update Sets at any time (during development or release period). Executing a Live Check will create a new entry in a related list stating the issues contained in that specific Update Set, along with some generic information about the execution.
Each issue will let you know its severity, the type of issue, the area of impact along with the element and code line affected. Also a link to the best practice documentation so you can check how to quickly remediate it.
Besides being able to check the status of the Update Set in your ServiceNow instance through our ServiceNow App (available in the ServiceNow Store by clicking HERE), you can also check a more detailed view on the data in our website.
Quality Gates:
The perfect combination with the Update Set Live Check feature. To avoid delivering or moving bad quality code, Quality Gates, in combination with the Live Check feature can help you block (or soft-block, so to speak) any Update Set completion.
When completing an Update Set, a Live Check will be executed and based on the results and your Quality Gates configuration. You can also allow Low and Warning issues to go-by. We will let you know this Update Set is not up to the standards you previously set up. As we want to give you a way out, you can specify a reason to skip the Quality Gates and complete the Update Set anyway. It will create a Quality Gate Skip entry. This will effectively record who, when and why this gate was skipped.
Release Manager:
Release Manager is just the icing on the cake. Do you feel confused when releases come or it just takes away so much energy? Make it easy with Quality Clouds Release Manager.
Group as many Update Sets as you need under a Quality Clouds Release. From there, execute Live Checks for the whole release, and see if the Quality Gate for the whole release is failing. All child Update Sets are grouped under a parent Update Set. When you close the release it triggers the Quality Gate and the Live Check (as in the Update Set completion and promotion).
See under one single view, all the changes that you are promoting, any Live Check issues and also any potential clashes you might encounter. Clashes between local Update Sets will be shown on release, and clashes on target instances will be added in the future. Ensure a smooth release before even promoting your changes and gain control with Quality Clouds Release Manager.
Update Set Consolidation doesn’t have to be confusing. We have the tools to help. To find out more, book a demo with the Quality Clouds team.