DevOps Lifecycle Breakdown: Custom Analyzer Rule Challenges

Plan

• Lack of official guidance makes it hard to scope and estimate rule implementation.
• No clarity on what’s possible—no rule taxonomy, no design patterns, no best practices.

Develop

• Poor SDK support: No IntelliSense, no NuGet package, no project template.
• Developers rely on trial-and-error and reverse engineering.
• No structured way to inspect or mock workflows during rule creation.

Build

• Confusing .NET requirements: target framework must match Studio version and project settings.
• Builds break silently or load inconsistently across machines.

Test

• No test framework: Can’t write unit tests or validate rules against sample workflows.
• No CLI, mocking tools, or diagnostics to verify rule behavior before deployment.

Release

• No versioning or packaging standard for rules.
• Hard to coordinate changes across teams or between dev/staging/prod environments.

Deploy

• Deployment paths vary by Studio version and governance mode.
• Rules can silently fail to load or be overridden by policies, with no logging or feedback.

Operate

• No monitoring tools: Can’t track which rules ran, what was triggered, or developer usage.
• Developers can disable rules easily—no enforcement mechanism.

Monitor

• No analytics or visibility into rule effectiveness.
• Teams can’t learn from patterns or adjust based on results.

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Conclusion: Custom analyzer rules are a powerful idea trapped in a broken toolchain. To make them viable, investment is needed in documentation, tooling, and process alignment—by developers, community, and vendor alike.