Quality Gates

What is Quality Gate?

Quality Gate is a mechanism for preventing any new technical debt from coming into the platform. It helps you in creating and implementing a strategy for dealing with technical debt in your platform. When you enable a quality gate on your instance, you create a baseline of issues to work from, and you define which new issues can be created while dealing with the debt (accepted). The baseline can be set to a date in time, by default, all existing issues are baselined to today. 

Issues baseline is a snapshot of your platform quality issues taken after a recent full quality scan or activation date scan. It is the total number of issues - subdivided into corresponding numbers of issues by each impact area - and a point in time at which you want to start restricting any new issues coming into the platform. The numbers are split in two categories:

• FAIL: existing issues that are required to be fixed (they are above the radar of the accepted issues configured).
• PASS: existing issues that are not required to be fixed (the are below the radar of the accepted issues configured).

Setting up a Quality Gate

You can set up a quality gate for every instance, repository or org you have defined in Quality Clouds, provided that you have at least one full scan performed on it. 

→ To set up a quality gate

1. Log in to the Admin portal.
2. Go to Instances section, and choose the instance you want to add quality gate to and click the Edit. This opens the instance connection details. 
3. In the Quality Gate section, review the Issue baseline with the total issue number and breakdown of the activation date scan. The PASS are the issues you are accepting as the baseline you will be working from. The FAIL are the issues that you are expecting to be fixed.
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4. Enable the quality gate by switching the slider. 

5. In the Issues accepted, select the severity of any new issues you want to allow by moving the slider from None to Low or to Medium. As you play with the slider, the Issue baseline numbers are dynamically calculated to help understand the debt to accept (PASS section).

   You cannot select High as that would mean having no quality gate at all. 

6. In the Activation Date section, by default is today (most recent scan) and Issue baseline numbers should be all PASS. In case of not willing to accept ALL existing issues, you can adjust the date of the reference scan (in example, when a project started or when a new team handed over). The third option called ALL TIMES uses the very first scan as a reference, this is used in case you expect to clean the not accepted issues already existing in the platform. 
7. In the Advanced options section, is possible to fine tune the accepted issues by Severity Area. Helping to be more strict with areas like Security and don't accept any issue at all.

8. Click Save.

You have now set up a quality gate for the instance or org of your choice. Starting with the next scan you will be able to see whether this gate has failed or passed. 

Monitoring Quality Gate

Once you've set up your quality gate, you can monitor whether any new undesired quality issues are being added to your platform. Quality gate is being checked by full quality scans, and it creates a result per scan. 

→ To monitor the quality gate

1. In the portal, navigate to the instance you want to monitor, and select one of the views.
2. Review the result of the latest scan by checking the Quality Gate banner: green - for the quality gate passed, red - for quality gate failed, and blue - for quality gate not set yet.
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You can check the quality gate state from all the views that are related to full scans.