Salesforce Best Release Management Exp

1.What is release management?

Release Management is the process responsible for planning, scheduling, and controlling the build, in addition to testing and deploying Releases.

2.What are the different types of releases you suggest in Salesforce Agile Projects?    

• BAU (Business As Usual) Release : Whenever there is no dependency/new implementation can go with this release,Generally this happens for every sprint on  Mid of the day - Wed

• MR (Monthly) Release : Whenever there is dependency on existing system like integrations or others should go with this release.So that both the teams can perform integration and regression testing.It happens generally on  Weekend - Sat

3. How do you collaborate between different teams for release?Ex:10-15 teams.

-->Design Meetings : This is 1st initial step should be in place to have a successful collaboration across different teams.

In this meeting generally  Product Owners & Architects will join discuss on the new requirements they are going to implement and list the affected common objects / code.The details will be highlighted and captured in the confluence documentation for reference across teams.

-->Release Meetings :

• Fortnightly [In case sprint is 2 weeks]
• Monthly

-->Release Management Checklist :Every team who is participating in the release of particular BAU /MR should fill the details of checklist.Ex:

• Sprint number,
• User Stories ,
• Code /Schema changes, 
• Common code/schema changes

4. What is the deployment flow?

Note : Create a separate branch for each environment and code merge should be taken care from moving from one environment to other and all the environment base code pulled from Master branch.

5. Which of the above environments are common across the teams?

• SIT
• UAT
• Pre-Prod
• Prod

6. Give your project release management flow ?

•    Github as Code Repository

•    GoCD pipeline for Continuous Delivery - [Branch Code → GoCD → Sandbox] -  This can be scheduled also.

•    Beyond Compare used for code merge

7. Any suggestion for deployment?

Please take care of Profile deployment,Profile should have complete metadata from production and on top of that merge the new changes

8.  What is the rollback plan ?

Since many teams changes packaged and deploying together ,reverting specific project changes is difficult.Few workarounds.

1.Design wise should have flag basis option to disable the running of the code in case of deployment failure.

2.Deploy a quick or hot fix / missing component through changeset to make successful deployment