Establishing quality standards in your team

Fixing a bug costs far more once the bug has reached production users. 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.

Establishing standard practices for your development team can prevent these types of issues and allows you to focus on delivering new features to your users. These practices include:

• Leveraging branch reviews
• Establishing rule check-in approval process
• Addressing guardrail warnings
• Creating custom guardrail warnings
• Monitoring alerts and exception

Establishing these practices on your team helps to ensure that your application is of the highest quality possible before promoting to other environments or allowing the change's inclusion in the continuous integration pipeline.

To increase your application's quality, you or a branch development team can create reviews of branch contents. For more information on how to create and manage branch reviews, see the help topic Branch reviews.

The Branch quality landing page aids the branch review process, displaying guardrail warnings, merge conflicts, and unit test results. It is important to maintain a high compliance score and to ensure the code is tested. The Deployment Manager’s non-optional pxCheckForGuardrails flow will 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.

Use Pulse to collaborate on reviews. Pulse can also send emails when a branch review is assigned and closed. Once all comments and quality concerns are addressed, you can merge the branch into the application.

You can enable and customize the default rule check-in approval process to perform steps you see 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.

The Application Guardrails landing page (Dev Studio > Configure > Application > Quality > Guardrails) helps you understand how compliant your application is with best practices or guardrails. For more information on the reporting metrics and key indicators that are available on the landing page, see the help topic 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 on how to manage warnings, see the help topic 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 prior to moving the rule to another environment, see the How to create custom rule warnings section in Guided development through guardrails.

Do not promote applications with frequent alerts and exceptions to other environments. Use Pega Predictive Diagnostic Cloud™ (PDC), an AI-powered technology used throughout the application life cycle to assess your application's health, notify you of critical issues, and resolve performance and stability problems. Use Pega Predictive Diagnostic Cloud™ (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.