Managing Salesforce Releases and their effects on Platform Customizations

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What makes Salesforce so impressive is the ability to allow users to build highly functional enterprise-level applications and customizations without having to write the code. But these functionalities come with a cost. With more functionalities, users might face issues regarding managing Salesforce releases and source control. 

Each organization would have different business cultures and release requirements. The need is to always stick with the best practices. The goal of Salesforce release management after performing customization is to maintain consistency of your resource-independent processes that will help to achieve optimal business value. 

Ways for Efficiently Managing Salesforce Releases

The layered development of Salesforce customizations might end up in a complex Salesforce environment for a business. This can complicate release management, restricting users from using Salesforce to its full potential. But as long as Salesforce developers follow these best practices of Salesforce release management, you should not face any problems.  

1. Divide Projects into Groups

Your Salesforce development pipeline would have many projects of different complexity levels. You can separate these projects into three categories to determine the amount of attention they need:

• Patch: These include simple changes that won’t affect the complete functionality of Salesforce. They would only need the basest levels of release management. 
• Minor Release: These are the changes that will have a limited impact on your Salesforce org. 
• Major Release: These releases would have a significant impact on the system. They are likely to involve multiple dependencies. 

Managing releases with Salesforce projects would become easier when you know the impact of each kind of release. 

2. Define Roles and Expectations

Take time to assign relevant team members to different tasks. It is important to assign roles to the team with the best skills, ensuring the team members know everything that’s expected when managing Salesforce releases. 

The team should be aware of the scope, timelines, and measurable deliverables and should be able to communicate the expectations and goals efficiently. 

3. Follow a Change Management Process

To ensure sound release management, the team needs to follow a reliable and foolproof change management process. The Salesforce developers would make changes or create features in their sandbox, and these changes would be moved to the QA environment. QA team will then test features according to the requirements. 

For efficient change management, all the components would be reviewed together. It includes maintaining requirement documents, test cases, and the latest code. 

4. Automate Processes Wherever Possible

Many of the tasks for successful Salesforce development and deployment would be monotonous and redundant, which can be cut down with automation. You can streamline different tasks throughout the pipeline using automation to eliminate errors and inaccuracy. 

With automated release management, you can access many essential tools and personalize them according to your business needs. This will include services like continuous integration, verifying code health, data backups, and more. 

Take Expert Help for Managing Salesforce Releases

Salesforce release management is a way to streamline your business operations, making your Salesforce customizations work with a release. Implying all the above-mentioned points will help you manage releases efficiently. But when working with a complex Salesforce environment, hire certified Salesforce experts to get the job done. 

Get the best help for managing Salesforce release and its effects on your Salesforce org. Contact us to discuss your business architecture and needs.