Best way to conduct code reviews?

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

Stewart Burchell — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 11:20:11 GMT

There is the AQuAMan application on the AppMarket which is designed to conduct Appian "code" reviews. You can define your own object standards and compare a patch (or an entire Application) against these standards.

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

Mike Schmitt — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 20:24:10 GMT

Each individual object has its own version history, with change date and user who made the change. Thankfully we can now pull a DIFF between any two arbitrary versions of the object tyeps that are DIFFable and this is very informative when needed. These objects are not stored as "files" per se, as you'll find when you gain more experience with using Appian. I'd suggest you become a bit more familiar with what an Appian environment *is*, and what goes on inside of it, before taking on issues as nuanced and complex as this one.

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

emineo0001 — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 17:56:44 GMT

Hi Shyam, thank you for your reply. As in a Java project, can we see a detailed commit history like who/when changed which files? And most important, can we create a development branch and then merge it to a master branch?

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

Shyam Bommakanti — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 17:45:28 GMT

The code in Appian is not exactly code that is similar to traditional development.

You can do code reviewing using compare versions. It's pretty neat:

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

emineo0001 — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 17:30:23 GMT

Hi, I am struggling with the same issue now. I am new to Appian. Is there a way to do code reviews in Appian as in tradition development? Has anyone have any comment to share with me?

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

vishnuv — Mon, 17 Sep 2018 10:19:36 GMT

Few other links that can be added to checklist when review is done
docs.appian.com/.../Messaging_Best_Practices.html
docs.appian.com/.../ux_getting_started.html
docs.appian.com/.../building_accessible_applications.html
docs.appian.com/.../SAIL_Performance.html
docs.appian.com/.../Designing_for_Offline_Mobile.html

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

Sunil Zacharia — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 20:59:27 GMT

18.3 was just announced today and it comes with a feature we’ve been waiting for. In 18.3 you can compare expression and interface rules with the latest version of the code. Appian has an inbuilt comparator to make reviews more efficient.
Just the feature that can solve most of our issues with code review. Cheers :)

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

srikanthm0004 — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 20:51:15 GMT

We have an extensive checklist that we follow for Appian Objects namely,

|All new objects adhere to naming conventions| | |
|The story has been unit tested| | |
|UI adheres to style guide| | |
|The Closing template has been adequately filled out| | |
|Release Notes contain all relevant technical changes| | |
|Test cases have been created / Updated| | |
|Regression Tests have been brought forward| | |
|All new or modified objects have been logged in the release tracker| | |
|Ticket Application has been created and object match the release tracker| | |
|Any relevant deployment information has been logged in the release tracker including scripts| | |
|*Process Models*| | |
|unique identifier is included in the process model display name| | |
|Process flows are optimized and easy to understand| | |
|Security has been set on all process models| | |
|Alerts are properly set| | |
|All updates have been logged in process model annotations| | |
|*SAIL*| | |
|SAIL contains no unused/duplicate variables| | |
|SAIL performs to standard| | |
|Reusable logic has been broken out into expression rules| | |
|*Database*| | |
|All new or modified SQL statements have been pull requested in GIT| | |
|Any newly created CDTs do not duplicate a previously existing CDT name| | |
|All SQL statements have been logged in the release tracker| | |
|Pull request has been merged in GIT| | |
|Scripts have the proper script ending| | |

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

ashokv — Thu, 09 Aug 2018 23:24:47 GMT

Hi,
The Code review tool is not shared to the community. It needed some changes, the last time I worked on it 3yrs ago, but it was handy tool though. You can try building ur own by reading the XML tags of various components of Appian export package.

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

sahithip120 — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 04:44:52 GMT

Hi Ashok,
Can you provide more details on the tool built for code review. Is it shared in community?

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

Shiva Valusa — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 04:13:05 GMT

Hi,

Better to create a check list by referring Appian best practices like so many practitioners suggested in this thread.

community.appian.com/.../checklists
community.appian.com/search

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

gaurav_laturkar — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 04:00:01 GMT

I agree with most of the practitioners. We created checklist for various components (SAIL, Process Model, Rules/Constants etc) to take care if best practices, naming conventions, documentation practices etc being followed while designing. And we carry out code reviews use case by use case. Plus health checks per sprint is also a good practice to catch any abnormalities beforehand.

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

anshuk611 — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 05:50:42 GMT

You can create a checklist of the points that needs to be validated.Latest version of Appian supports automated testting of expression rules.These are few links which would help you to review your code.
docs.appian.com/.../ux_getting_started.html
docs.appian.com/.../Database_Schema_Best_Practices.html
docs.appian.com/.../Tempo_Best_Practices.html

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

smriti p0001 — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 04:59:41 GMT

there is no automated tool to do this , developers need to maintain the change log and then review has to be done object by object before deployment to higher environments.

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

saboulnaga — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 17:26:45 GMT

I would first look at the size of your project to determine what method works best for you. The suggestions here work for most cases, but depending on the complexity of the application, team size, and number of artifacts, you might have to come up with a review process that works best for your team. It's highly manual. Reviewing based on a story is a good starting point, but also having a vetted checklist that is sufficient to determine if is a code is reviewed properly is a consistent and reliable way for you to move forward. Not everyone will require the same level and attention during a review, so you may have to make that determination yourself. Jacob's suggestion and Mike Cichy are definitely 2 areas for you to explore. However looking for some automated way to do this like a diff or something, you might hit some roadblocks there.

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

Mike Cichy — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 16:34:24 GMT

Per Ashok and Christine, there are two levels of reviews - code structure and best practices/design review.

For the former, there is no easy way to do it - SAIL could be maintained in git and potentially diffed. From there, things will get progressively more challenging all the way to process models which at this point have to reviewed visually. As Christine noted, change logs with peer review are the best way in this situation.

As for design reviews, we have best practices checklists for each stage of a project. Additionally, I always start my review with teams running Appian Health Check, which checks for many items on the best practices lists and focusing on the flagged risks. It is incredibly useful - at some point teams include it into the delivery cycle and only escalate items that they are having a hard time resolving.

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

ashokv — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 07:02:29 GMT

I think code reviewers should check whether the process has been designed as per the best practices proposed by Appian. They should make a checklist of the best practices in both process model design and Interfaces and check if these best practices have been implemented. Ex: Checking the performance view for the UI(Interfaces). It should be as minimal as possible say less than 100ms to avoid bad end user experience. For process models, check for security, archieval settings,alerts configured and if a new field is added to the UI, u need to consider how the existing instances work without breaking up.
We did built a code review tool, some time back which checks whether the best practices have been followed in the process and generate a report by uploading the package into the tool.

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

harrisont606 — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 15:47:49 GMT

Running the health check in the lower environments can also be a good way to automatically detect bad practices, provided you don't have a lot of junk objects in the environment.

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

Jamal Case — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 23:43:29 GMT

As far as Process Model's go, you can generate the documentation for the different versions of the PM's and then you can use a diff checking tool to compare the different versions and see what has been changed in the PM.

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

ChristineLHutchison — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 20:21:54 GMT

No tool - all manual. Our developers create change logs. Those change logs then go through peer review, where all objects are validated to be in the patch app and the objects themselves are reviewed against checklists.

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

inder_arora — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 18:03:17 GMT

Hi,

As jacob suggested heavily commented code is one of the key for increasing the efficiency of review. Creating test cases for expression rules at the time they are written is very good practice and since now Appian provides Automated Testing for Expression Rules, it will be really helpful while reviewing the test expressions.
For a proper functional testing you can use Fitness/UI Testing, which is really helpful for testing the proper functionality of an application.

RE: Best way to conduct code reviews?

Jacob Grafenstein — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 14:15:36 GMT

Generally we review our code story by story. We list the objects that were created in our scrum board so that the reviewer will know what items to look at. We require heavily commented code to increase the efficiency of the review. Additionally, for expression rules, you can require that your developers create test cases, which will greatly speed up the review and testing of code.

The ease for code review is definitely a limitation of Appian, but the way to go about it is to organize outside of Appian.