Last year, I spent some time reviewing a few of the releases to the store by the Innovation lab.
Some were of more use for me in my role as a Platform Architect. The Express List stands out particularly, and is of course now part of the core ServiceNow product. Several customers I spoke with about it very quickly then reviewed it themselves, and then adopted it into their production operation.
So I wanted to take some time out to repeat the process. Next up: Developer Workspace.
A caveat before I go any further. Innovation Lab offerings, as is made clear on the store too, are unsupported by ServiceNow, so they don't carry any warranties.
Developer Workspace is a trivial application to install from the store. There are a couple of dependencies: Agile - Scaled Agile Framework - Essential SAFe, and Agile Development 2.0.
First impression on loading the workspace and whizzing through the workspace tabs was "great, I've got an inbuilt search, some sensible looking cards for my work, and a cool calendar and tools library". Two minutes later, I'm confused about how to configure the content in the workspace. There are no document references in the store, or modules in the Core UI or workspace itself… Hmmm.
Looking more carefully at the store; I notice there is mention of a guide. It's not attached to the latest version of the store release as a file though. I noticed that if you navigate to other versions and look at 1.0.2… bingo. An Install guide PDF.
The config is very basic. You create records from Core UI in two configuration tables for the calendar entries and the various tool configurations (instances, documents, apps, references, etc). There are no modules that point you to these config tables; you have to navigate to them directly. This is not altogether uncommon for an innovation release; and it is straightforward to follow.
I found that creating the developer tools records was a little odd. The form at least in my instance contained several on screen fields which were not referenced in the install doc. It did work though, and in a few minutes I’d got a few calendar entries and reference records in the tools section to bring it to life…
As well as a selection of tools…
It's pretty good for a free capability. With the right tools records added, and some care taken to populate and maintain the calendar, I think it fills a bit of a gap I see in a few organisations. Core admin teams who are managing instances in particular; who deal with a mixture of releases, upgrades, incidents and the occasional story.
I would personally find it useful to see in the list of tools, docs and references things like:-
- Developer guidelines and policies
- Technical governance artefacts (data, environmental, DA guidance, etc)
- Architecture artefacts (Instance landscape, integration map, etc)
I have always liked the idea of maintaining specific artefacts relevant to ServiceNow development in a knowledge base in the instance itself, in specific categories. If one takes that approach to maintaining content in categories similar to those suggestions above, direct tools links can be forged to those categories on the knowledge portal...
My final thought is that although the developer workspace is not aimed at pure developer personas; much of the content we see above is super valuable for them; especially when they are onboarding. I'd see it being a place to go even for those squad developers when they are onboarding; or want a refresh on the platform config, policies or governance.
