RE: Creating a program to live review Appian code

Stewart Burchell — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 11:38:05 GMT

I've not heard of anything that conducts what I will call a "real-time Quality Review". I think there are a few things to consider:

how 'annoying' would it be for a developer to be continuously interrupted with "You've not added any comments", "You haven't added any Test Cases" etc? It might pay to consider taking the quality check to an off-line phase. Or, perhaps, expose the list of quality check items as a checklist that sits to one side of the object being developed, where the Developer can check them off manually (there may be good reasons why they've not done something that would otherwise be considered to be desirable/required - but even here I have reservations (see below)
you'd need the ability to allow individual Projects to both inherit 'best practices' from a single course, but also define their own 'Definition of Good' - that is, each Appian Application would need to be able to define what, say, the Dev Lead thinks should be their own 'Definition of Good' (a good example would be to ensure all objects have the same Application prefix for their name - this prefix will be different for every Application, but the same within the context of an Application)
I'm leaning to the idea of having this not in real-time for two reasons:
- it's definitely NOT good practice for a Developer to 'mark their own homework' - that is, if they can choose to override what's being suggested by the Quality Check tool then there is no independent 'Peer Review' step actually taking place
- you'd want to run all of the Quality Checks as part of a 'Quality gateway' between DEV and the first TEST environment and this should be able to be injected into the Deployment pipeline and used to govern whether a Deployment is allowed to take place for a given Patch or full Application export.