Quality Clouds 21.2.2.0 Release Notes

Release date: 1st July, 2021

New general features and changes

• Profiling view provides a new PDF report generation.

The report contains almost all the selected instance characteristics, from inventory to best practice violations. In addition, the report has an executive summary section (called highlights) at the top with the 3 main aspects you should be worried about; or happy if everything looks fine. We applied red and green colours to quickly catch your eye attention.

The report can be also branded by:

• 1. Providing notes that are embedded at the top right corner. These notes are like breadcrumbs to understand the situation of the instance and include some actions/decision for later actioning and recording.
  2. Providing your company or project logo image.

• Executive view now supports quality gates trend: open/closed and baseline

The executive view provides a super complete view of the health and quality of the instance, including inventory, best practices and team metrics and trends. Now is possible to focus in tracking net new violations, and how the trend evolves from the baseline scan when the quality gates were activated. 

The baseline scan is now marked in colour and with an asterisk in the dropdown menu of scan dates. By selecting the baseline scan you can check all your existing legacy issues.

In addition, the quality gate condition result is shown at the top following the colour code:

1. 1. In orange when activated the gate, but full scan triggered to set the Baseline.
   2. In blue indicating the date of the gate activation and Baseline.
   3. In red when failed.
   4. And in green when passed.

• Governance view enhancements.

• Minor bugs and changes.

Quality Clouds for ServiceNow

• Our ServiceNow App now controls the change of update-set State according to OLD Quality Gates

This new feature will require to provide a justification by an admin role in case of trying to change the state of an update-set to Complete and failing Quality Gates. The purpose is to Complete update-sets only when they pass the Quality Gate, and there is no outstanding new issues pending to fix. Before using this justification process we recommend the following:

1. 1. every-time
   2. Perform a write-off on the new issues causing the Quality Gate to FAIL. 
   3. Be an admin, override the Quality Gate and provide a reason.

• Our ServiceNow App now allows to write-off issues

By just clicking in an issue, in case of already written off, a red warning will be shown indicating the issue is under write-off scrutiny. In case no write off has been already done, a button will appear to apply write off and provide justification.

You may typically perform a write-off in case of one of the following situations, and always impacts the quality and metrics:

1. 1. Complex solution, requires refactoring
   2. Insufficient time to fix and test
   3. Complex to test and validate all situations
   4. False positive
   5. Other

By default, all write-off requests are automatically approved by the platform and reason/justification recorded for future actioning.

Important: Issues written-off by the ServiceNow App will appear in the QC Instance dashboards after the next full scan execution, to maintain the instance quality metrics consistent. 

• Write off through QC Admin portal now asks for justification and reason

Navigating through the Admin portal and history, selecting a full scan you can write-off issues, now the platform requires the same information as ServiceNow App does: reason and justification to allow future quality and technical debt management and remediation.

Important: All Quality metrics shown in the dashboards are updated with written-off actions in next full scan. This is to avoid moving metrics after a full scan has been executed and reviewed. Once the new full scan runs, all the applied write-off from the last full scan will appear, and the information will be shown:

Mouse over a written-off issue in the Executive view reveals the reason, justification and approver.

• Upgradeability view now includes Impact Analysis console to search for dependencies and relations of OOTB tables, Script Includes and UI Scripts. 

Available from Paris onwards, this function will help you to understand the graph of the elements in ServiceNow. Typically, a table is considered the core and most basic configuration element of the platform. Tables can contain dozens of artifacts that configure the behaviour of your application, identifying these dozens of artifacts that belong to a table is not a trivial activity.

With this new feature you can obtain all the elements that depend on a specific OOTB table immediately, allowing you to measure the impact of adding a new field or modifying the table structure.

There is a very ambitious plan to cover all ServiceNow configuration element types and their dependencies, first applied to OOTB architecture, and later expanded to customer developments.

• Our new Release Management view contains more and more insights

This view provides realtime visibility of the ServiceNow update-set quality checks activity performed across all your development and non-development instances in two ways:

1. 1. Using our ServiceNow LiveCheck App on update-set management pages. 
   2. Exporting update-sets to XML and launching the LiveCheck quality through the QC Portal.

The way quality is checked is now shown with a small tag/badge called APP/PORTAL.

The view includes not only quality and best practices related results, but all the inventory that is included in the update-set, no matter if there are issues or not.

In addition to handy columns like inferred Release Type (Fix, Minor and Major) we now also capture the update-set status.

• Inactive elements and commented code can now be excluded to avoid our analytics engines to trigger issues.

• New ServiceNow rules

Quality Clouds for Salesforce

• Managed packages are now excluded by default by our Salesforce analytics engine.