Establishing quality standards in your team

To increase the quality of your application, you or a branch development team can conduct reviews of branch contents. By reviewing code changes before they are merged into the main codebase, you can catch bugs and ensure that code is maintainable and scalable. This can help improve the overall quality of your application and reduce the risk of issues in production environments. Code reviews can also help ensure that knowledge is shared across the team and that code is consistent with established best practices and coding standards.

For more information on how to create and manage branch reviews, see Branch reviews.

The Branch Quality landing page is a useful tool for aiding the branch review process. It displays guardrail warnings, merge conflicts, and unit test results, which can help identify potential issues and ensure that code changes meet established standards. As a best practice, it is important to maintain a high compliance score and ensure that code undergoes thorough testing before being merged into the main codebase. 

To help enforce compliance and ensure that code changes meet established standards, the mandatory pxCheckForGuardrails flow in Deployment Manager can be used to halt a merge attempt when a Get Branch Guardrails response shows that the weighted guardrail compliance score is less than the minimum-allowed guardrail score. 

To collaborate on reviews and ensure that all quality concerns are addressed, Pulse can be used to facilitate communication and send emails when a branch review is assigned and closed. Once all comments and quality concerns have been addressed, the branch can be merged into the application. By following these best practices, your team can ensure that code changes are thoroughly reviewed, tested, and compliant with established standards, ultimately leading to a higher-quality application and better user experience.

Enabling and customizing the default rule check-in approval process can help maintain the quality of the checked-in rules. By modifying the check-in approval process, you can route check-ins from junior team members to senior team members for review, ensuring that code changes are thoroughly reviewed and meet established standards. 

To customize the check-in approval process, you can use the Check-In Approval Process tool in Dev Studio. This tool enables you to define the steps that must be performed before a rule can be checked in, including routing the check-in to specific team members for review and approval. 

For example, you can create a custom approval step that routes check-ins from junior team members to senior team members for review. This can help ensure that code changes are thoroughly reviewed and meet established standards before being checked in. 

By customizing the check-in approval process, your team can ensure that code changes are thoroughly reviewed and meet established standards, which can lead to a better application and a better user experience. 

The Application Guardrails landing page is a useful tool for understanding how compliant your application is with best practices or guardrails. The landing page can be accessed in the header of Dev Studio by clicking Configure > Application > Quality > Guardrails. 

By using the Application Guardrails landing page, you can gain insight into the compliance of your application with established best practices and guardrails. This can help you identify areas where improvements can be made and ensure that your application is of the highest possible quality. 

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.

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. 

It is important to avoid promoting applications with frequent alerts and exceptions to other environments. Doing so can lead to issues in production environments and negatively impact the user experience. To ensure that your application is stable and performing optimally, it is recommended to use Pega Predictive Diagnostic Center(PDC). 

PDC is a powerful tool that can be used to assess the health of your application, notify you about critical issues, and resolve performance and stability problems. Whether you are a Pega Cloud® Services customer or use the PDC service to monitor your on-premises or private cloud deployments, PDC can help you identify and resolve issues before they impact users. 

By using PDC, you can gain insight into the performance and stability of your application, including identifying areas where improvements can be made. PDC can also provide real-time alerts and notifications about critical issues, enabling you to take action quickly and prevent issues from impacting users. 

Overall, using PDC is a best practice for ensuring that your application is stable, performing optimally, and providing a high-quality user experience. By making use of the power of PDC, you can identify and resolve issues before they impact users, which can ultimately lead to a better user experience and the increased business value of your application. 

For more information, see Pega Predictive Diagnostic Center.

Apart from PDC, 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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