Release Management - can we consolidate all the update sets into one big master update set for prod release?

[MS12]

I have been reading of best release management practices for ServiceNow and I'm aware of moving update sets from Dev > Test > UAT > Prod.

Between dev and other sub prod instances it makes sense to move update sets story by story. My question is for the prod move has anyone tried batching all the update sets for the release into one big update set. So I have to only click commit on the parent update set and all the children get committed (just like how executable works for .Net solutions).

This way all stories are committed at same time. I realize there might be exceptions where import, fix script etc has to be run. Those can be handled separately but for the straightforward ones any tried and true processes to bulk commit the update sets?

Any ideas are appreciated.

[Sulabh Garg · Accepted solution]

Hi MS,

Yes, There is a feature in ServiceNow "Update set Batching" which enable you to group update sets together so you can preview and commit them in bulk.

Dealing with multiple update sets can lead to problems, including committing update sets in the wrong order or inadvertently leaving out one or more sets. You can avoid these problems by grouping completed update sets into a batch.

The system organizes update set batches into a hierarchy. One update set can act as the parent for multiple child update sets. A given set can be both a child and parent, enabling multiple-level hierarchies. One update set at the top level of the hierarchy acts as the base update set.

When you preview or commit the base update set, you preview or commit the entire batch. The system determines the processing order, and checks for collisions, based on the dates the changes were recorded, and on their sequential ancestry. Their ancestries are the specific instances in which the changes in the update sets took place.

Hope it helps!!

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Regards
Sulabh Garg

[MS12]

Thank you! This was very helpful. The only word of caution is, if you're releasing a large batch of changes and there's schema updates (to large tables like user/task) and other things happening, there's chance your system might hang. It happened to me. So now I make smaller batches. Learned my lesson.