Your Business Needs Best Salesforce Release Management Practices

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Your Business Needs Best Salesforce Release
Management Practices
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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. 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.
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• 1. 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. Applicatio
  n 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.

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Challenges for effective Salesforce Release
Management 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.
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Continued- 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. 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.
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Continued- 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.
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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.
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• 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.
• 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.

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• A developer needs to integrate frequently so
  that changes can be rolled back and integration
  issues can be resolved quickly if any.
• 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.

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Continued 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. Choose
a team that can help you with a well-defined
framework for Salesforce release management that
is beneficial for almost every business worldwide
instead of their size or location.

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Thank You
Reference https//medium.com/_at_williamhills/your-b
usiness-needs-best-salesforce-release-management-p
ractices-44c31fe46109
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