Overview
Building high-quality, reliable stories in Tines starts with following a set of consistent best practices. This guide outlines key recommendations for naming, documentation, testing, and change control. These are all designed to make your stories easier to manage, safer to run, and more effective over time.
Best practices
Enable change control
Enforce change control tenant-wide, using drafts as the "development" environment and the live version of the story as the “production” environment for each story. Require change control approvers to follow a standardized checklist of best practices when reviewing changes. Ensure that all branches of a story can be tested using the saved story runs feature.
This mirrors a proven software development workflow, reducing the risk of breaking changes in production. It ensures every update is reviewed and tested before being deployed, creating a safer and more predictable environment for automation.
Establish standards for story building
Enforce a standardization for the creation of stories with the following recommendations:
The story name is descriptive and concisely covers the usage. Whitespace and symbols are allowed (even encouraged) for readability. For example: Proofpoint - Phishing Ticket Creation
The story description should expand on the story's name and include details such as the creator/author(s), inputs, outputs, limitations, and expected usages. The story description should ideally cover ("It" being the story):
"It's designed to..."
"It looks for..."
"It depends on..."
Authors
Name each action uniquely to reflect its purpose in your story.
Enable action/story monitoring.
Align your actions so that they follow the path of your story (you can also utilize the Tidy feature).
Use story tags to help identify the story's usage concisely and trackably. Use tags for topics like certain use cases, frequency of use, and priority.
Utilize note tiles throughout the story to explain the functionality for each step.
Audit stories
Build a Tines story to regularly audit stories for best practices on a daily or weekly cadence. Automated audits help catch issues early and consistently, ensuring that stories continue to meet your standards over time, not just at the time of creation.