What Are The Best Practices And Tools For Salesforce Release Management?

It is not desirable to view Salesforce Release Management apart from others as they have to be considered integral to the business strategy as well as the business objectives of a company. The main goal of release management would be to ensure optimal achievement of business value and utilization through reliable, resource-independent and repeatable processes that are consistent. Ensure proper optimization of the application delivery value chain so as to assure the business value is delivered without any bottle necks especially at a time when most of the companies are engaged in running business projects that are shorter at the same time high-yielding.

Let us discuss in detail the best practices to be followed in Salesforce Release Management.

Initial Steps

1. Reducing the total limit for the number of system administrators.
2. Begin the tracking of changes in a systematic way
3. Assist in prioritizing the projects by getting in the stakeholders
4. Utilize the admins and their power in other departments during instances where staffs are not available
5. Utilizing the potential of native Salesforce tools such as Sandboxes and Cloud Deploy/Change Sets for Release Management

Critical Best Practices for SFDC

The three most relevant and critical best practices for SFDC are;

1. Making use of test-driven development
2. Making use of a source repository
3. Enhanced maintenance of a deployment pipeline

Features of Release Management

Identifiable - It deals with the identification of environment, source and components within a specific release.

Reproducible - Better operational stability can be assured with the integration of source, data as well as deployment externals.

Accountable - It is capable of providing audit as well as accountability for software deployments.

Agile - The presence of agile methodologies include continuous integration, distributed teams as well as iterative development.

Challenges in Software Release Management

Combining the modifications made across multiple SFDC environments can be considered as a difficult task

It is extremely challenging if the company is comprised of a small team of developers

The need for a method to perform the tasks automatically

Change Sets and Force.com Migration Tool

Salesforce Release Management is tailored to assist deployments that are successful and streamlining of the way in which companies work with the Salesforce organizations. The more accurate tools businesses select in deployments, more time as well as effort can be saved. Especially two types of tools are used for managing the org deployments namely change sets and Force.com migration tool. Both of these tools have benefits as well as drawbacks.

Out of this, change sets have limited capabilities and are not ideal to scale with large development teams as it functions natively within Salesforce. Force.com Migration Tool, on the other hand, is powerful, however, can prove to be extremely challenging for the inexperienced users. The release management levels being deployed by the companies should be determined by the size and complexity of the development projects. At times, the Salesforce Admins face the challenges of preparing the perfect org type corresponding to each stage of the Release Management process that can be considered as very important. It can range from the full sandbox, partial copy sandbox, production and developer sandbox etc.

William Hills is a technical writer at JanBask. He loves writing and sharing topics on Web Design Services, Web Development, Salesforce Services & Cloud services and latest trends going around in web world.