Best practices for managing and deploying custom applications?

[JennyHu]

Hi Community,

I'm looking for best practices in managing and deploying ServiceNow custom applications.     I have a custom scoped application on a DEV instance and wish to push to staging for testing, and later to production.

From my understanding, there are two options to publish a custom application: update set, and application repository.   Application Repository option seems to improve the update set experience, and it can keep track of the application version.

If I choose the Application Repository option, what happens if I have some hot fixes to push out after the first deployment, while still having some dev work for Phase 2?   Can I selectively choose what updates to publish to the Application Repository so I don't publish unfinished work for Phase 2?

I found that ServiceNow has an online training course on Deploying Application.   This is great! I still need to go through the course entirely.     On the Deployment Options Consideration page, why does it say?

• Avoid using update sets to install applications. Instead, use the application repository or the ServiceNow Store to install applications.

Also, how to ensure that the application I publish is "clean" without any dev and out of scope work?   In Studio, should I be reviewing the Application Files from File > Settings > Application Files tab or is reviewing the application files from the Application Explorer sufficient?   What we found is that, there seems to be a lot more application files included in the Application Files tab than the ones listed in Application Explorer.

Thanks,

Jenny

[Miguel Donayre]

Hello,

Here is a good tech paper that outlines the Deployment options, as well as a video that outlines all of the options in detail - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOZOWG6Mk4A&t=268s