Cloud approved plug-in quality assurance with new Appian Versions

Do the cloud approved plug-ins authored by external Appian client/partners go through any formal quality assurance/review process prior to  the Appian cloud new release upgrade cycles? 

 As a new partner we are trying to establish strategy/guidelines about if/when to use non Appian supported plug-ins in a cloud environment and what risks we would be taking.

Thanks.

  Discussion posts and replies are publicly visible

  • For custom plug-ins available via the AppMarket there is an initial review process to determine if they can be listed and meet the Cloud policies per the guidelines specified here: https://community.appian.com/p/plugin-policies

    Custom plug-ins are intended to be tested and validated by the consumer for their use and with new versions of Appian.

  • Hi Sanchita,

    Thought that would be the answer thanks for confirming.

  • 0
    Appian Employee
    in reply to btravis

    Just to add to what Sanchita said, Appian offers an unparalleled backwards compatibility promise: https://docs.appian.com/suite/help/19.3/backward-compatibility.html  Our goal is always to make updates seamless, and we are very much aware that customers use a wide-variety of plugins across their environments. To that end, while we do intend for plugins to be tested and maintained by customers, we also consider plugin compatibility to be a very high priority, and it is something that we always keep in mind updating the product. 

    While we do not necessarily (at the moment) provide quality assurance for any of the particular plugins that customers might use, we do test and validate the underlying APIs that those plugins use to ensure that they continue working as you'd expect with each release. Generally speaking, we expect that any changes affecting plugins would be 1) rare (for example, we make every effort to avoid changing APIs that we know are in current usage in plugins) and 2) documented in the release notes for the corresponding update. If the behavior of one of your cloud approved plugins were to change following a software update, it would be entirely appropriate to create a support case, and we would work urgently with you to remedy the affected functionality.

  • Hi Eliot,

    Thanks for the expanded clarifications and links. 

    So just to clarify your response, to make sure Im understanding it correctly, there is still risk, even though Appian goes to great lengths to minimize those risks, that a response to a new case related to a non-Appian authored cloud approved plugin could still result in an answer that we need to contact the author through the community for a fix?

  • 0
    Appian Employee
    in reply to btravis

    Yes, that is correct, with the additional clarification that if there is demonstrably a backwards compatibility issue with one or more of the specific APIs in the plugin, then we would accept that as a product matter, rather than a "plugin problem" and we would own responsibility for remediating that. Nevertheless, I do acknowledge that, in practice, the line between a "product API issue" and a "plugin design issue" can be more blurred, so I think your overall understanding is still more or less correct.