What is your approach to quality assurance and technical governance of your ServiceNow platform?
As a ServiceNow product owner, architect, team leader or senior developer, how do you know that everything that’s been developed conforms to both ServiceNow’s standards and Javascript best practice. After all, your environment runs, your team is busy, clients are by and large happy and everything on the surface looks healthy.
But is it?
We ask this question as unless you have a robust and comprehensive technical governance process that embraces automation to check code quality and adherence to best practice on a continual basis you don’t really know. The consequences to your environment could be serious.
Common software vulnerabilities can be exploited opening your environment to data leakage
Deviating from ServiceNow’s declared standards creates potential performance and upgrade issues
A simple mistake in a for loop can lead to an infinite loop causing significant performance issues when executing
Complex code may run fine on small loads during testing but perform exponentially slower on production load infuriating your users
And of course, better quality code standards reduce downstream costs of maintaining your software in the future
What can you do to ensure quality and integrity?
You can declare standards in offline documents and trust that your developers have read and adhered to the contents
You can train the team and trust that they aren’t having an off day
You can buddy up your developers, shadow them as they work and trust that standards don’t slip
You can introduce a stage in your SDLC process that requires someone to attest to the fact that they have verified everything they should have and trust that it’s effective
In our research on this topic we have found that most clients attempt to do this to varying levels of maturity. Some have used tools available in the market and ServiceNow’s own health check, plus a services engagement to assess and remediate the issues found.
As well-intentioned as these are, we believe they fall short of achieving what’s ultimately possible by introducing automation. The current products available in the market aren’t comprehensive, plus as humans, we forget things, we don’t have enough time, we skim activities when we know we should really be more thorough and finally, it’s just not interesting to check someone else work at a code level. I’m sure there are some companies out there that do this very well but typically they are the exception.
We think there’s a better way
We are a consultancy business first and foremost. Vorto was established to help businesses get the most from their ServiceNow environment. We are fortunate to have some great developers, one of whom decided he wanted to help developers write better code that ultimately addresses that goal. He designed the first version of our app as a training tool. From the idea he worked with our lead developer to create a more comprehensive solution which we launched at NowForum London 2019; we call it vt:codeworks, an automated quality assurance framework to govern the technical integrity of your ServiceNow platform.
The application is useful for every client and services partner regardless of the maturity of the environment.
If you are new to ServiceNow it ensures developers follow the rules and best practice from day one
If your developers are relatively inexperienced it’s a real-time training tool that will accelerate their learning
If you are a mature client, it can check what’s been done historically and help you remediate issues
If you have an external partner, you can analyse and highlight issues to them with minimal effort from the detailed dashboards
If there’s a process that is exhibiting performance issues our app can scan it and potentially help by identifying areas of concern
If you are a ServiceNow services partner this can bring confidence to your clients that everything is being delivered to standards and best practice plus they can have total transparency into your work
If you want transparency into your environment and ensure it’s in a healthy, secure, performant and upgradeable state with the added ability to verify how your own developers and external developers are performing then take a look at vt:codeworks
Visit here for more information www.vorto.co/codeworks and join our webinar on December 10th at 16:00 GMT to find out more about its exciting features.
Click here to register for the webinar
We welcome feedback to this topic and the features that our application provides through LinkedIn or to info@vorto.co.