What is Guardrails Score?

  • As you work with Pega Platform you will see messages. These messages are known as guardrails.
  • Pega guardrails help ensure that you and your team use best practices for configuring Pega applications.
  • Pega provides standard guardrail capabilities that enable development team members to track compliance with Pega best practices.
  • Following best practices & Compliance with the guardrails can help you to deliver applications that are easier to maintain & upgrade, and have significantly fewer defects compared to applications that deviate from best practices.
  • Guardrails can help you to achieve project Success, optimal performance, reuse, and maintainability for applications.

Why to Increase guardrails:

  • When creating an application it is always a good idea to follow the best practices for whatever technology we are working with.
  • By not following best practices we add increased risk that our application development effort could go off course.
  • It can also make the application difficult to maintain and update.
  • It is also possible that our application can get out of control and crash the project entirely.
  • Guardrails are best practices and guidance about situations that contain risky conditions or that might result in an undesirable outcome.
  • Guardrails ensure you can assess the overall quality of an application by referring to its compliance score.
  • A compliance score provides an executive-level summary of whether your application is guardrail-compliant.
  • You can improve your compliance score, and avoid potential maintenance and performance issues by reducing the number of warnings in your application.

Range of Compliance scores:

  • Compliance scores range from 0 to 100, with 100 representing the highest possible score:
  • All developers must ensure to have a guardrail score of 97-100 across all applications
RecommendedAs a best practice, verify that an application has a score of 97 or greater before deploying it to your production system.
AcceptableA score of 90 or greater indicates your application is in good standing.
ImproveA score of 80 to 89 indicates your application needs review for improvement.
AttentionA score below 80 requires immediate action.

Application Guardrails landing page:

We can view the compliance score for an application by following path

Designer Studio > Application > Guardrails > Compliance Score.

  • Compliance score – A weighted score for each application that measures overall compliance with application design best practices, or guardrails
  • % Compliant rules – The percentage of rules in your application that do not have severe, moderate, and informational warnings.
  • Total rules – The total number of rules in your application
  • Rules with warnings – The number of rules with warnings. Click the number to view a list of rules by name, ruleset, rule type, applies to class, the last update time, and who made the last change.
  • Rules with unjustified warnings – The number of rules with unjustified warnings. Click the number to view a list of rules by name, ruleset, rule type, applies to class, the last update time, and who made the last change.

The Warning Details tab provides a centralized view of these warnings, with more information on the actions you can take to resolve them

Compliance score calculating formula:

To generate a compliance score, the Pega Platform calculates a weighted numerator based on the number of severe and moderate warnings in the application. Then, the system makes a comparison against the remaining number of rules in the application that have caution-level or no warnings. The result is converted to a percentage, protecting against any negative values, as outlined in the following formula:

The variables in this formula are interpreted as follows:

  • Sev1u – The number of unjustified, severe (severity level 1) warnings in the application.
  • Sev2u – The number of unjustified, moderate (severity level 2) warnings in the application.
  • Sev1j – The number of justified, severe (severity level 1) warnings in the application.
  • Sev2j – The number of justified, moderate (severity level 2) warnings in the application.
  • Total Remaining Rules – The sum of rules with caution (severity level 3) warnings and rules with no warnings in the application. This value excludes property rules and rules that reside in a Pega-* ruleset

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