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, activate the Quality Gates icon to have access to its configuration. The Quality Gates configuration screen is divided into 3 sections: baseline, blocking rules, and smart tagging.

4. Baseline section: there is a snapshot of your platform quality issues taken after a recent full scan and the technical debt (in hours) before the activation date. When the activation date is changed, the values are recalculated, which will affect the blocking rules category. The activation date shows when the issue was found.  The activation owner will be added when saving the configuration changes.  
5. Blocking Rules section: is shown the total issues and technical debt after the activation date. It has been incorporated a new feature to block issues for each impact area, which will display the rules and issues effected and the technical debt value.
6. Quality Gates categoritzation section: The Quality Gates Categories classifies three type of issues depending on the activation date:
   - Blocking: Issues created after activation date and affected by blocking rules.
   - Minors: Issues created after activation date and not affected by blocking rules.
   -Legacy: All issues created before activation date.                                                                                    Note that warning issues and approved writte-off issues are not included in the categoritzation section.

7. 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 Executive view.
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.