Best Practices and Guardrails

 

Purpose of Best Practices

Best practices are well-defined methods or techniques that lead to desired results. Every best practice has at least one goal. A best practice is proven to make progress towards achieving its goals. If an organization follows best practices, it can predict a desired result with minimal problems or complications.

Best practices are used in everyday life. For example, when preparing a meal, a best practice is to always use a potholder when touching a hot pot. The goal is to not burn yourself, and using a potholder is a proven way to prevent you from burning yourself.

As you design and build your application, establish and follow best practices to increase your chances of project success. Look for existing best practices used by your organization and by Pega. Select existing best practices or create new best practices to meet your goals. Applying best practices increases the likelihood that your application is delivered on time and meets all of its design requirements.

Tips for Establishing Best Practices

1. Address the specific goals of your organization

if an organizational goal is to ensure the protection of sensitive customer information, a best practice to outsource developers may not be appropriate — the developers may also be working for the organization's competitors

2. Fit with the structure of your organization

If a best practice places authority in a single person or part of the organization, it does not provide value if your project teams are supposed to be able to make their own decisions.

3. Be appropriate for the resources of your organization

Understanding what a particular best practice requires in regard to resources — whether money, personnel, or skills — is essential. Make sure that your organization can provide those resources before committing to a specific best practice.

4. Be cost effective

If a best practice works well for other organizations but requires an unacceptable amount of money or time to reproduce in your organization, it will be hard to justify the use of that best practice.

Leverage DCO to Improve Project Quality

Directly Capture Objectives (DCO) enables a project team to directly enter business requirements for an application into Pega. DCO helps eliminate translation errors, saves the team time and effort, facilitates direct engagement of business and IT resources around visible working models, and enables project participants to optimally review work progress.

Use Standard Pega Capabilities

Pega 7 has many features and capabilities built into the product. Research the Pega Discovery Network or Pega Platform Help to find a Pega solution that already exists for your task. Use Pega capabilities, which have been tested and proven reliable.

For example, assume you want a process to require increasing levels of management review based on the amount of the loan request. Rather than building the process yourself, use an approval process that Pega has already built. You can modify the process to support your requirements in a fraction of the time needed to build the process.

Iterate and Test As Your Build

Use the most agile, iterative delivery model that your organization can adopt. First, separate large applications into smaller, more manageable components. For example, instead of building the complete application and then testing the completed application all at once, build and test individual processes incrementally. Then, demonstrate completed features to interested parties who can provide feedback.

Begin testing early in the project life cycle to drive higher levels of product quality. Test each new feature or capability to make sure it works. Then, test the system for processing issues that may affect performance. Also, check to see if the new features work together without error. Finally, have analysts test the application to make sure the application meets the requirements and business objectives.

Communicate Project Process At All Levels

1. Daily standup meetings to set priorities, review issues and ensure alignment 
2. Weekly project updates to track issues and report progress 
3. Biweekly and monthly meetings to review the project and ensure the application confirms to design objectives.

Ensure Project Team Members Are Certified

Business architect and project management resources pass the Certified Business Architect exam and Developers should, at a minimum, pass the Certified System Architect exam.

Comply with Pega Guardrails

Compliance with the Pega guardrails results in applications that are:

1. Easier to maintain and upgrade.
2. Have significantly fewer defects than non-compliant applications.
   

Collaborate with Everyone Invested in Project

Bring business users, business analysts, and system architects together so they can share their unique skills and viewpoints.

Identify project champions who can help promote user adoption.