Last Updated: August 2025

The customer, a leading international petroleum company ranking among the top 5 globally, faced challenges in ensuring developers were following best practices and controlling technical debt within its extensive and complex ServiceNow platform. The company lacked a centralized approach for code review processes, making it challenging to oversee code output and developer performance eectively. Consequently, this lack of visibility resulted in a lower level of software quality upon delivery, leading to an accumulation of issues and uncontrolled technical debt. Their primary objectives were to enhance overall code quality and identify and remediate problematic code introduced in the past.

The Impact

If left unaddressed, the customer would have been at risk of negatively impacting critical business Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which could have included, but were not limited to, the following consequences:

• Increased time and costs required for senior sta to perform manual code reviews

• Increase in technical debt impacting productivity and innovation

• Increased risk of outages and performance issues

• Escalating costs related to the maintenance and evolution of their ServiceNow
  instances

• Eventually the platform was likely to require rebuilding because of technical debt
  severely impacting the ability to upgrade or add new applications / features

The Desired Solution

The customer was looking for a product that offered more than just what was wrong with the existing code, they needed a tool that could provide transparency across their development teams as well as ensure best practices were used.

In summary their goals were to:

• Understand their existing implementation and implement processes, tools, and automation to remediate

• Prevent future development work introducing unplanned tech debt

• Implement tools and processes to automate and streamline the development processes and to bake quality into the implementation

  
  

The Resolution: Find It, Fix It, Prevent It

Quality Clouds provided a rapid assessment via their automated scanning technology. This provided the customer with a snapshot of their platform’s current health. With this information the customer was able to develop a targeted remediation plan, initially prioritizing security, and performance issues. Subsequently, they ensured that new code and releases met the newly defined quality standards. By implementing best practices and a governance model with support from the Quality Clouds team, the customer successfully improved the quality and performance of both their ServiceNow platform and their developer team.

The Impact: Technical Debt Reduction by 30%

By using Quality Clouds, the customer was able to achieve measurable outcomes that
delivered a positive impact that was seen in their KPIs including:

• Reduced technical debt by 30% while the implementation grew by 25%

• Increased developer productivity by 10%

• Reduced the number of incidents and outages by 35%

• They also added visibility, freed up developer time, and produced greater control:

• Minimized number of manual reviews

• Prevented the introduction of issues at the source

• Enhanced control over existing technical debt

• Increased platform governance & visibility

• Centralized best practice management

• Drove performance and boosted productivity

"A must have app. Quality Clouds has been pivotal for us to keep track of developer best practices and control our technical debts of our massive ServiceNow platform. This is also being used to drive our Quality Gates for our CI/CD logic and will be the first line of defence to allow / disallow code promotion. This is a must have App for complex ServiceNow implementations."

Petroleum Company Executive