Your Business Needs Expert Salesforce Release Management Practices

1. Your Business Needs Expert Salesforce Release Management Practices Release management is one of the most challenging aspects of the Salesforce platform. The availability of limited tools and complex functionalities add direct impact on business, particularly for the organizations that are larger in size. “JanBask helps you with best Salesforce release management strategy so that your business can gain the most from their Salesforce investment.” From individual developers to large sized team, the best practices discussed in the blog will help you to manage risks, improves the overall success rate for the Salesforce deployment and maximizes cost efficiency too. About Salesforce Release Management and why it is important? Release management provides a framework to control changes and promote the advanced version and align it with the current releases. Application development with Salesforce is much easier and faster when compared to the previous platforms. A complete range of deployment management tools are also available that are sufficient for small sized organizations but there is an emergency need for a more integrated approach which employs release management for large organizations. Here, best salesforce release management practices can help organizations to manage their product deployments effectively across different departments. Challenges for effective Salesforce Release Management Different Release Environments Different Parallel Releases Complex and heavy deployments Out-of-Sync environments No version controls Different release environments– The code has to pass through various release environments before it is deployed to the production. Having a strong maintenance of all these release environments is a challenge that needs to take care at each sandbox level. Different parallel releases– Release are of multiple types like major releases, minor releases, daily releases, weekly releases etc. Making sure that product development and release environments are perfectly synchronized with parallel releases is still a challenge.

2. Complex and heavy deployments – Salesforce environments are usually complex and heavy due to custom objects, large permission sets, profiles etc. This is a challenge to manage all of these elements at the time of deployment without any destruction. Out-of-Sync Environment– Every time when changes are made to the Salesforce release environment then it may be difficult for the developers to keep a track of progress and production organizations go out-of-sync in the end. No Version controls –Since changes are made to custom objects, metadata members, salesforce release environments, profiles etc., this may be difficult for the developers to keep track of each version control and roll them back. This ultimately leads to overwriting of code in the end. Best Salesforce Release management practices Here, is your complete guide to best Salesforce release management practices that works amazingly for any organization instead of its size and production environments. Let us discuss on each of the suggestion one by one and implement them in the same way to get most of your Salesforce investments. Design the right sandbox for your release This is the primary requirement for effective Salesforce release management where you have to focus right sandbox designing for various releases at the different phases. As per our experience, you should design separate sandbox for development, training, testing etc to get the best results in the end. Plan for best continuous integrations to automate the deployments For the companies larger in size, this is necessary to have proper version control and continuous integration mechanism so that team can effectively manage the risks, control changes, and roll them back whenever it is required. The process not only saves your development time but make the overall deployment of the product much faster than your expectations. When you set up continuous integration, it makes sure that code has been integrated throughout the development process and issues are addressed at the same time only. Here is a list of best practices for continuous integration – First of all, you should maintain a central version control repository. A developer needs to commit changes frequently, at least once a day. If it would happen then you would be able to know the actual state of the software/application. A developer needs to integrate frequently so that changes can be rolled back and integration issues can be resolved quickly if any.

3. Now automate the deployment and perform regression testing based on the requirements. Model the Salesforce release environments across departments First of all, you should run local tests to a development environment so that issues can be detected and fixed to the earliest stage and you may experience a better deployment release across departments. Now, this is necessary to validate the various components before they are finally deployed. If there are any issues then make sure that they are rolled back and fixed earliest. You should focus on recent validations only that are performed during last week or last few ways to make the deployment faster. The quick validations accelerate the deployment rate much faster than your expectations. In the end, run only a subset of tests instead of performing all tests together so that overall test execution time can be reduced significantly. Release Calendar Management The releases need to scheduled well and there is need to prepare a proper release calendar for this purpose so that you can notify users before time and make sure that all changes are clearly visible as expected by the users. Most importantly, you should consider salesforce releases timelines and make then properly aligned with your project releases for better Salesforce release management. Mention sign off criteria for each release phase You should mention the sign-off criteria for each release phase not for production environment only. When entry and exit requirements are well-defined then they are easy to meet as expected by the users. Privacy of release environments This is necessary that different release environments should not be accessed directly for bug detection and bug fixes. The best idea is to define security criteria for each release environment to enhance overall privacy and accelerate the deployments. Pre/post deployment operations management There are certain tasks that need to check manually on different release environments. The manual tasks include pre/post operations management for faster deployment. Regression test automation As soon as the complexity of apps grows over time then it is necessary that regression testing should be automated so that changes can be managed effectively and it should be clearly visible for faster release velocity.

4. Considerations for production deployments You have to make sure that future Salesforce releases are not going to affect your current releases. This is the reason why Salesforce releases should be scheduled well and notified in advance to avoid the later complications. You should send notification at least one month earlier the major release and try to add maximum functionalities to the newer version to make it even more popular and useful. Considerations for deployment window For the deployment window, you should set a limit on the number of users that can access your product or application. Send frequent alerts or notifications to the active users about future releases or versions. You need to lock the access during the maintenance window and allow administrators to access the maintenance window to make the necessary changes. Also, rollback users, profiles or tabs if you want them to access relevant details during deployment window. Final Words With this blog, you know how to overcome the Salesforce release management challenges and adopt the best practices to manage the risks and accelerate the deployments. JanBask team helps you with a well-defined framework for Salesforce release management that is beneficial for almost every business worldwide instead of their size or location. Reference: https://medium.com/@williamhills/your-business-needs-best-salesforce- release-management-practices-44c31fe46109