What is Quality Gates? #

A Quality Gate in Quality Clouds is an automated enforcement checkpoint in your ServiceNow or Salesforce deployment pipeline. It prevents code or configuration changes from being promoted to the next environment unless they meet your organisation’s defined governance standards. Quality Gates are configurable by environment, team, and platform — and can operate in blocking mode (hard stop on policy violation) or advisory mode (surface findings without blocking).

Quality Gates address a specific gap in CI/CD tooling: standard pipeline tools manage deployment flow but do not evaluate code quality or security compliance. Quality Clouds adds this governance layer, ensuring that nothing reaches production without passing the standards your organisation has defined.

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Why this matters #

Without proper controls, risky changes can move through your deployment pipeline unnoticed, introducing security issues, performance degradation, or increased technical debt into production.

Quality Gates enforce governance at the right moment, before changes are deployed, ensuring that only code that meets your organization’s standards is promoted.

This allows teams to:

• Prevent issues from reaching production
• Maintain consistent quality standards across teams
• Reduce technical debt accumulation over time
• Enable faster, safer releases with built-in governance

 

How it Works? #

When a Quality Gate is enabled for an instance, repository, or org:

• A baseline of existing issues is established. A snapshot of existing platform issues as of a specific date (usually after the last full scan). This separates existing debt from new issues.

• Rules are defined to determine whether new issues are allowed or blocked.

• Subsequent scans validate if changes comply with those rules.

The system classifies issues into two main groups:

• ✅ PASS: Issues below the configured acceptance thresholds; not required to be fixed.

• ❌ FAIL: Issues exceeding thresholds and needing resolution.

The baseline date acts as a “starting point” and can be customized. By default, it’s set to the date of the latest full quality scan at the time of activation.

 

Setting up a Quality Gate #

To set up a Quality Gate, you must have:

• Admin access to the Quality Clouds Admin Portal

• At least one full scan run on the target environment

Steps

1. Log in to the Admin Portal.

2. Navigate to the Instances section.

3. Select the desired instance and click Edit.

4. In the Quality Gate section, toggle the activation icon to enable configuration.

5. Configure the two sections:

   • Baseline: Choose activation date. This sets the starting snapshot of issues and technical debt.

   • Blocking Rules: Define thresholds per impact area (e.g., Security, Performance). Any new issue beyond the limit will block the gate.

6. Click Save to finalize the setup.
   
   

 

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. 

 

Non-Blocking Quality Gates (New) #

In addition to blocking gates, Quality Clouds now supports Non-Blocking Quality Gates.

These gates do not block deployments, but still surface quality insights that help organizations:

• Track issue trends

• Identify emerging technical debt

• Encourage early remediation
  
  

Benefits: #

• Promotes continuous quality improvement without interrupting workflows

• Easy to enable and disable based on a specific customer situation.

• Provides visibility for dashboards, reports, and integrations

Use them to monitor:

• Accumulation of specific issue types

• Long-term quality metrics

• Developer behavior and compliance trends

 

Monitoring Quality Gate #

After setup, each full quality scan checks your platform against the defined Quality Gate. You can monitor results directly in the Admin Portal.

How to Monitor: #

1. Open the instance in the portal.

2. Go to the Executive View.

3. Check the Quality Gate Banner:

   • 🟢 Green: Passed

   • 🔴 Red: Failed

   • 🔵 Blue: Not configured

From here, you can drill down into the scan results and act on any violations or anomalies.

Summary #