Because the benefits are a matter of perspective, we’ll be comparing benefits both for the organization and for the project manager. Quality gates rely on checklists that project managers have to go through at different stages in the project lifecycle. These checklists include a number of questions addressing various aspects of the project, including scope, budget, stakeholders, risks and compliance. In most cases, you will never need to adjust the definition of your quality gate, as the default quality gate built into SonarCloud (called the “Sonar Way” quality gate) is suitable for most projects. You can either use the Keptn CLI or the Keptn REST API, depending on the use case.

According to Salger et alii [11] it can be grouped into the conceptual and operative level and is described in the QGP. Many projects simply don’t have enough quality controls or checklists in place http://dvui.ru/odzson_rukovodsvo_kluba_i_igroki_na_oey_sorone.html to ensure a quality product. Learn which “quality gates” are needed for each phase of your project. Milestones divide the course of a project into verifiable sections such as project phases.

Quality gate status

Unlike the previous one, this definition of quality gate is objective, automated, and usually applied at the code level. Often software projects fail to meet time, budget and other requirements, but monitoring the quality of project results by presetting benchmarks and steering a project at key points can help resolve these issues. This allows SonarLint to leverage your team’s quality profiles, synchronize other analysis settings and alert you to analysis results that appear at later stages in the dev cycle. Either way, triggering a Keptn quality gate starts an evaluation of the given SLIs in a defined timeframe.

The opposite, when gate criteria are not fulfilled, is the kill decision, which implies the failure of required quality criteria to proceed from phase X to phase X+1. An option to work with insufficient and not met criteria at a quality gate but still not killing the whole project is the recycle decision. In this case, the gatekeeper, e.g. the project manager, decides to revise the project and return to phase X and re-align. This decision is made when a project is still considered meaningful and worthwhile to rework, the criteria why the gate was not passed should not be of significance. The last option is the hold decision, which comes into play when a project is put on hold. This decision is useful when other project-dependent processes are not at the current stage to be sufficient for a gate go.

Quality Profile Extend

Designed to provide benchmarks for quality standards, these gates are commonly used throughout application or software development projects. Typically, quality gates are located before phases that are highly dependent on the outcome of a previous phase, particularly where potential trouble spots need to be addressed and resolved. Airbus implemented quality gates from the designs over parts up to a final aircraft and therefore considers them end-to-end gates. Every single time a project or product from a supplier is supposed to proceed to the next stage Airbus assesses the quality specifications and decides on the proceeding.

• Don’t torpedo your IT project by thinking that this is yet another series of useless documents to be completed.
• The IT project manager and a senior executive or sponsor involved with the project should review the checklists.
• On the other hand, you have the more concrete and objective quality gates, which are implemented by various tools.
• You should adjust your quality gates so that they provide clear feedback to developers looking at their project page.
• Put the responsible people, e.g. the department’s manager (John Doe, Morten Menigmand, Erika Mustermann) into the column for deliverable responsible instead of the department (HR, IT, R&D).

Since then there have been no more issues with the supplier and products and documentation come at the quality level asked for. Quality gates are customizable and their format varies by level of implementation. Some applications, such as with internal frameworks, may need stronger requirements than others.

Why you should implement quality gates

Quality gates are defined at the organization level and applied at the project level. Each project has one quality gate assigned from among those defined in the organization. After setting the new code definition, perform another analysis (by pushing some code change) and a quality gate should appear. For more details on setting up the definition, see New code definition. Quality gates are displayed in the SonarCloud interface in conjunction with the analysis results of the main branch of the project, other non-main branches, and pull requests. Ensure that quality gates cover the whole project lifecycle and do not only cover a particular part.

They have implemented these gates because lack of quality concerns their Final Assembly Lines (FAL) and have found that these concerns especially arise from parts by external supplier. Airbus and the supplier degree on targets and deliverables which they can measure, control and review at handover meetings. So, in this context, a quality gate is an automated verification you can use to enforce the adherence to one or more quality standards. Like the previous type of quality gate, this one also preserves the metaphor. Think of it as an actual gate that prevents the code from going forward in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) pipeline if it doesn’t meet the defined quality criteria.

In fact, after initially scanning all your projects, the ‘report cards’ returned might be quite depressing! Your team can’t fix past problems, that accumulated over weeks or even years, overnight. It shows an important metric—rework, aka code churn—across iterations.

The specific criteria used will, of course, vary depending on a number of factors, such as the type of the product or service in development, the size and nature of the organization, and more. This is probably the most commonly asked interview question for project management candidates. SonarCloud provides developers with a host of insights into issues in their code.