Salesforce release management is not an isolated operation in business. Instead, it’s closely tangled with other business processes such as business organization and governance, business objective, change management, and other organizational aspects.
An advisory committee and a Center of Excellent team of an organization oversee the release management process to make sure that it’s done successfully. Through a well-ordered release management process, companies attempt to have a reliable procedure that can smoothly achieve business goals by boosting business value and effective utilization of resources.
It’s vital in any business organization to have an enhanced application and delivery value chain for them to deliver the business values without delays and problems. As such, several departments of an organization need to work on with the release management process.
Here are the main aspects of Salesforce release management process that you need to consider for you to streamline and standardize the process.
Release Management
Multiple systems handle various sets of customer’s requirements while there's a centralized system that manages those different systems. A centralized system enhances visibility, allowing members in a team to track changes easily.
This setup creates a set of priorities for the requests for changes, and it enables an advisory committee to have a periodic review of the requirements that can also help prioritize changes in the system.
In the implementation stage, both the Business and the entire IT team must communicate with each other. Then in the in the full release cycle, the IT, Quality Assurance, Release Management, and the Business team must likewise have proper communication.
The IT team should create a release calendar that includes the time and date for such activities such as quality assurance, unit testing, production system cycles, and final deployment.
Change Management Process
In Salesforce, there’s what users call a developer sandbox meant for testing and development in an isolated environment. It contains a copy of the configuration or metadata of your production org. Developers can change this sandbox as well as display or demonstrate the changes.
When features are completed, developers can move them to the quality assurance environment. The QA team will have feature testing under the required documentation. Then they can be submitted to the unit testing department wherein the change management process begins.
There will also be a review of the components like production code, requirement documents, and test cases for the completion of the process.
Alignment with the Salesforce Release
Since Salesforce continually enhances its code, organizations sometimes have a hard time releasing their own code with Salesforce. Thus, you need to evaluate what’s the difficulty and find solutions to it.
For instance, you should find the right way of testing the changes and determining the changes release. It’s also essential to have an assessment of the business values of the changes with Salesforce latest features and which features an organization should plan for the uptake.
You should also determine how many users will be affected by the internal release. Knowing the available sandboxes for testing internal changes is also a must. A change in the sandboxes will test several releases.
That’s why it’s crucial that there are testing and tracking of changes in advance to lessen the gap between the Salesforce release date and the software of your organization.
Planning and Management of Team Structures
During the planning stages, there should be a breakdown of the release into different categories. Separate teams should manage categories like the enhancements, trust, fixes, and projects. Here are the core teams for the entire process.
a). Business Team
This core group’s primary responsibility is the handling of changes of light configuration, which includes the creation and management of users data and page layouts. The control of the whole team depends on the work assigned to the different members of the team and its customers.
b). Service and Sales Team
This group is made up of the users whose responsibility is to handle the early cycle, quality assurance, change management process, RFP team and software quality team. Like the other teams, the service and sales team lessens problems in quality and boosts the chances of successful releases by an organization.
c). Enhancement and Project Team
The people assigned to the enhancement team takes responsibility for the management of the changes in small projects, such as changes in visual pages, triggers, or existing integration. Typically, the changes completed by this team don’t impact other team members.
The project team, on the other hand, does the significant and complicated changes. For instance, projects with multiple inter dependencies across the entire ecosystems like advanced ERP systems are done by this team.
Technological Control
For any organization, technical control is an integral part of Salesforce release management to reduce quality issues in the process.
a). Management of Sandboxes
Organizations should keep in mind of this vital aspect of release management, especially those that have multiple types of sandboxes. In these sandboxes, an organization can keep up the efficient management of the quality of its software.
b). Version Control
Version control is where truth and genuineness originates. Developers can work on their code management through proper version control to avoid issues and control the quality of their software. Not only that, but developers can also optimize accountability via version control.
Three Approaches to Salesforce Release Management
Several factors like budget and team size can affect the process of change and release management of an organization. Thus, you should take note of the three different methods on how to manage your releases properly.
a). No Release Management Method
The no release management method is typically the go-to approach for small organizations. In this method, the application is simply placed between production and the developer’s sandboxes without going through unit testing and quality assurance. This approach is the most time-effective and budget-friendly among the three methods.
b). Basic Release Management Method
The basic release management approach usually uses source control management and integration testing. As there’s a sufficient structure, duplication of codes can be prevented in this method. Teams can review and conduct product testing as well.
c). Integrated Release Management Method
In big companies where there are multiple teams, an integrated release management method is advisable to use. This approach enables an organization to track and merge the changes to make sure that release is successful.
Takeaway
Knowing the aspects of Salesforce release management process is essential for the success of a business organization. The factors mentioned in this post like team management, sandbox management, technological control, and release cycles are the things that you need to consider for that purpose.
