DevOps Challenges in ServiceNow

Why is ServiceNow development and delivery so prone to bottlenecks and delays? Why do teams find themselves stuck regarding feature and app development and delivery on the Now Platform? There’s no single reason; instead, the answer to that question stems from the very nature of ServiceNow development.

For example, development teams use multiple instances (including shared instances) to develop features and apps. ServiceNow teams must align these multiple change streams into shared pre-production and production environments. Additionally, ServiceNow applications are usually complex, with multiple native elements, including code, scripts, plugins, plugin activation, data, and more. These must be identified, listed, and propagated from one instance to the next and eventually into production. Finally, multiple scopes and update sets can contain colliding code and see team members overriding one another’s work. Plus, the complexities of development are multiplied when quality and security are added into the mix - going beyond just achieving orderly deployment. All of this leaves ServiceNow development teams reliant on error-prone and laborious manual processes.

Why All The Headaches?

ServiceNow development bottlenecks tend to cluster around a few key issues with the platform:

• Core platform process complexities, especially at scale • Multi-environment inconsistencies

• Feature and mechanism complexity; update sets, apps, version control, plugins, data...

• No out-of-the-box support for CI/CD, nor Release Management/Release Automation

• Administrative complexity

In addition, no automatic release process is built into ServiceNow, meaning organizations create their own ad hoc manual processes. Team leads and product managers use spreadsheets and even Microsoft Word to document release payloads. These documents include an ordered list of all the ServiceNow elements that need to be deployed and the order in which they need to be deployed. This documentation can only be built after addressing the inconsistencies between ServiceNow environments. Environment inconsistencies are one of the reasons that manually building this kind of documentation is error-prone and time-consuming. On top of this, the release processes vary from organization to organization. Is it no wonder that delivery times for ServiceNow features and apps have been notoriously slow? The following section will explore three key DevOps methods that will power up ServiceNow to overcome these problems and get up to speed, meeting the challenges of modern development.