Establishing quality standards in your team
Fixing a bug costs far more once the bug reaches the users of a production environment. The pattern of allowing low-quality features into your production environment results in technical debt. Technical debt means you spend more time fixing bugs than working on new features that add business value. Allowing unreviewed or lightly tested changes to move through a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline can have disastrous results for your releases.
Establish standard practices for your development team to prevent these issues and focus on delivering new features to your users. These practices include:
- Using branch reviews.
- Establishing rule check-in approval process.
- Addressing guardrail warnings.
- Creating custom guardrail warnings.
- Monitoring alerts and exceptions.
These practices help your team ensure that your application is of the highest quality possible before they promote it to other environments or allow the inclusion of changes in the continuous integration pipeline.
Using branch reviews
To increase the quality of your application, you or a branch development team can create reviews of branch contents. For more information on how to create and manage branch reviews, see Branch reviews.
The Branch quality landing page aids the branch review process, displaying guardrail warnings, merge conflicts, and unit test results. As a best practice, maintain a high compliance score and ensure that the code undergoes testing. The mandatory pxCheckForGuardrails flow in Deployment Manager halts a merge attempt when a Get Branch Guardrails response shows that the weighted guardrail compliance score is less than the minimum-allowed guardrail score.
Use Pulse to collaborate on reviews. Pulse can also send emails when a branch review is assigned and closed. Once the team addresses all comments and quality concerns, you can merge the branch into the application.
Establishing check-in approval
Enable and customize the default rule check-in approval process to perform steps as necessary to maintain the quality of the checked-in rules. For example, you can modify the check-in approval process to route check-ins from junior team members to senior team members for review.
Addressing application guardrail warnings
The Application Guardrails landing page (accessible by clicking Dev Studio > Configure > Application > Quality > Guardrails) helps you understand how compliant your application is with best practices or guardrails. For more information about the reporting metrics and key indicators that are available on the landing page, see Application Guardrails landing page.
Addressing the warnings can be time-consuming. Review and address these warnings daily so they do not become overwhelming and prevent you from moving your application features to other environments. For more information about how to manage warnings, see Improving your compliance score.
Creating custom guardrail warnings
You can create custom guardrail warnings to catch certain types of violations. For example, your organization wants to place a warning on any activity rule that uses the Obj-Delete activity method. You can create a custom guardrail warning to display a warning that must be justified before moving the rule to another environment.
Monitoring alerts and exceptions
Do not promote applications with frequent alerts and exceptions to other environments. Use Pega Predictive Diagnostic Cloud (PDC) to assess the health of your application, notify you about critical issues, and resolve performance and stability problems. Use PDC whether you are a Pega Cloud® Services customer or use the PDC service to monitor your on-premises or private cloud deployments. For more information, see Pega Predictive Diagnostic Cloud.
Apart from PDC, Use Autonomic Event Services (AES) to monitor the health of your application. For more information, see Introduction to Autonomic Event Services (AES). If you do not have access to AES, use the PegaRULES Log Analyzer (PLA) to download and analyze the contents of the application and exception logs. For more information, see PegaRULES Log Analyzer (PLA) on Pega Exchange.
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