To participate in ServiceNow as a citizen or delegated developer means to do some things that would ordinarily be done by the system admins, but can instead be done by other users with a more limited scope of control. A discussion with the service manager responsible for ServiceNow is a good place to start to see if being a citizen developer is a good fit for your team. 

Expected Use Cases for Citizen Developers

• Create and maintain order forms for service requests.
  
  
• Create and maintain flows to facilitate the delivery of service requests initiated through order forms.
  
  
• Create and maintain flows to automate task management processes within the platform.
  
  
• Create and maintain public support portals for departments.

 

Discouraged Use Cases for Citizen Developers

• Flows which require web custom web service calls.
  
  
• Complicated flows that primarily affect systems outside of ServiceNow.
  
  
• Complete custom applications which require dedicated data stores.

 

While ServiceNow technically supports the discouraged use cases, we feel those situations are more efficiently handled by the central team of system administrators. 

 

Learning Resources

To learn about the capabilities of the ServiceNow platform, citizen developer should sign up for a free "Personal Developer Instance (PDI)" from ServiceNow at their developer.servicenow.com site. Anyone can get one by creating a free account on that site. It is not linked to any BYU authentication systems. 

There is a lot of help on the internet for developing on ServiceNow. The "ServiceNow Community" user on YouTube is filled with official sessions from ServiceNow teams about their products. https://sn.works/workflowacademy/ 

 

Scoped Apps

All delegated or citizen development will be done within a scoped app. A scoped app is created by the primary ServiceNow system admins and then permissions are granted to a user or group to administer it. A scoped app is a bundle of experiences (like order forms) and automations (like workflows) that are always version and deployed together. There are three stages in the pipeline for scoped apps at BYU.

1. BUILD: The support-build.byu.edu instance of ServiceNow is the "dev" instance for scoped apps. Any editing to the scoped app must be done in this environment. When scoped app administrators are ready to move their work to production, they click the "Submit" button in their app in the App Engine Studio. A screen will pop up to prompt for version notes and a version number. The app will be bundled and saved to the ServiceNow App Repo. This will submit a request to the central ServiceNow system admins to promote the application to the Test instance. The entire app moves as a bundle. You can't promote a single flow or order form without also submitting the rest of the app at the same time. 
2. TEST: The support-test.byu.edu instance of ServiceNow is designated for testing applications before final deployment. The test instance is a relatively recent clone of the production environment. The test instance is configured so that it cannot send emails to prevent surprising notifications reaching end users. After you successfully test your application in the test environment, you must manually contact the ServiceNow admins to let them know you're finished with your testing and let them know when you're ready to deploy to production. 
3. PRODUCTION: support.byu.edu is the production instance of ServiceNow. You should not edit your order forms or flows in this environment. It usually tried to block this, but if you manage to modify order forms in the production environment, it may interfere with future updated coming from the build environment and cause new updates to be skipped until a full system administrator intervenes. 

 

Clone Downs

You should regularly publish your development work to production. Every couple of weeks, we clone the production instance down over the development and test instances. This will wipe out any development work that hasn't been published to the ServiceNow App Repo. The best way to publish is to submit it through the pipeline to get your app installed on the production instance. Publish often so you don't lose your development work. 

 

Collaborate and Coordinate with Central System Admins

There is a Microsoft Teams team set up for technical collaboration on ServiceNow. This is where you'll learn about dates for clone downs and where you can ask questions of the central admins or request that your application be sent to production after a successful deployment to the test instance. Contact the service manager or system admins if you have trouble joining the team. ServiceNow Technical Collaboration | General | Microsoft Teams