Team Development

Administer Team Development within your instance to compare instances, push or pull record versions, or view the team development dashboard.

Team Development administrators can require that pushes undergo code review before accepting pushes.

You must enable email notifications on the instance requiring code review for that instance to send code review notifications.

The Team Development Code Review workflow manages how changes are pushed to the parent.

You can exclude certain files from change tracking by creating an exclusion policy.

Team Development allows you to set up a distributed version control system between multiple ServiceNow instances where each instance acts as a source repository, or branch.

The Local Changes table tracks which customized records have current versions that exist on the development instance but not on the parent instance.

On the team dashboard, the Local Changes list shows the local changes that have not been queued for the next push or ignored for all pushes.

There are a variety of methods for viewing a list of versions for an object.

Developers synchronize their instances to the parent instance by pulling and pushing versions of customized records and resolving collisions between versions on the parent instance and the development instance.

To use Team Development, developers must have admin access to their development instance.

Administrators transfer version records between instances by moving customizations with Update Sets or the Team Development application.

Version records track changes to a customized record over time so that administrators can compare or revert to specific versions later.

Version records track changes to a customizable record over time so that you can compare or revert to a specific version later.

Configure Team Development for your instance.

The Diff Merge tool enables administrative users to compare differences between two versions of a record.

Team Development supports parallel development on multiple, non-production ServiceNow instances.

To use Team Development, application developers must have a set of credentials for each instance in the Team Development hierarchy.

There are some types of records that you cannot merge while resolving differences on the Compare to Current and Resolve Collision pages.

Pulling ignores versions when certain conditions occur.

The team dashboard provides a central place to manage all Team Development activities on your development instance.

The Update Versions [sys_update_version] table contains records that represent the state of a customizable object at a particular time.

Team Development allows multiple developers to work on applications.

Code reviewers must approve or reject a push from the Team Development application.

Back out all local changes and restore the last version reconciled with the parent instance.

Application developers can back out a push to remove unwanted changes.

Developers can cancel any push they submitted that is in the Awaiting Code Review stage.

If it becomes necessary to modify the instance hierarchy, you can change the parent for a development instance.

If the parent instance requires pushed changes to undergo code review, changes are placed in the Awaiting Code Review stage.

Code reviewers can compare the pushed versions to the local versions to see the potential effect of incoming changes.

You can compare the local instance to any other remote instance and commit any current versions from the remote instance on your development instance.

You can compare a version to the current version for any customizable object that a user has modified, such as a form layout or business rule. You can also compare the local and current pulled version of an object in Team Development. Administrators can suppress versions for specific tables.

Application developers can create an exclusion policy to prevent pushes or pulls to particular instances in the team development hierarchy.

For each instance, define other instances in the hierarchy as remote instances.

You can require a code review of all changes pushed to an instance.

Ignoring a local change prevents updates to a record from generating new versions in the Local Changes list.

Pulling retrieves versions of customized records from the parent instance and adds them on the development instance. Pulling does not retrieve any versions for changes made by system upgrades, but it retrieves all versions for changes made by users, not just the current version.

Pushing promotes changes from the development instance to the parent instance and commits the current version of a customized record on the development instance as the current version on the parent instance.

Application developers can queue a local change for a push to ensure the changes are available to other developers.

Reconciling first compares the local instance to the parent, and then generates the list of local changes and calculates the number of changes that are ready to pull from the parent.

A collision is detected when the pulled version and the current local version are modifications of a different version, indicating that someone else has modified the same record that you have modified. The team dashboard displays the number of collisions between the local and the parent instance.

You can resolve multiple collisions without reviewing the differences between the local and pulled versions.

You can undo changes to a customized record by reverting to an older version.

An instance can have multiple peer instances but only one parent instance.

Set up an instance hierarchy that best supports your development life cycle.

Administrators can configure a table so that it does not track customizations in the Versions [sys_update_version] table.

The basic Team Development process sets up the instance hierarchy, grants developer access rights, manages the movement of development changes from development instances to test instances, and promotes applications to the production instance.

Team Development supports parallel development on multiple, non-production ServiceNow instances.