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Overview

Release Manager Guide

DevOps practices work best when one or two team members take the role of release manager. They own the pipeline, the branches and the orgs, and they help the other contributors. On small projects, a tech lead or a senior admin plays this role part time.

DevOps Pipeline

Responsibilities

  • Support the team: train and help the contributors with the Contributor Guide, and answer their questions about branches and orgs.
  • Provide orgs: create and refresh the source-tracked dev sandboxes that contributors work in (one per contributor, or shared by several of them), and the sandboxes of the major branches.
  • Review and merge Pull Requests: check the validation jobs, solve conflicts, merge into the major branches.
  • Deploy to major orgs: promote the changes from integration to uat, preprod and production with Pull Requests between major branches.
  • Handle hotfixes and retrofits: run the RUN stream in parallel with the BUILD stream without regressions.
  • Generate Release Notes: document the tickets, Pull Requests, metadata changes, deployment actions and contributors of a release.
  • Follow DORA Metrics: measure deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate and time to restore.
  • Configure the project: package.xml, overwrite management, delta deployments, automated cleaning and the other .sfdx-hardis.yml settings.

Your tools in VS Code

The DevOps Pipeline panel of the VS Code SFDX Hardis extension shows the branches, the orgs, the open Pull Requests with their validation jobs and the running deployments. Click a major branch to list the Pull Requests merged since the last promotion, their tickets and their deployment actions, and to generate the release notes.

Pull Requests merged in a major branch

The Pipeline Settings panel edits the .sfdx-hardis.yml configuration with forms: deployment options, pre and post deployment commands, User Story options, ticketing, AI and Dev Hub settings.

Global Pipeline Settings panel

Under the hood

To understand what the CI jobs do during a validation or a deployment, read Smart Deploy internals: delta computation, test selection, package installation, overwrite filtering, Quick Deploy, deployment actions and notifications.

Special cases