ServiceNow Update Set Batching - Best Practices & Lessons Learnt

[The SN Nerd]

Hi Community,

ServiceNow introduced Update set batching in Jakarta.

This is our experience so far:

Usage

At this stage, we have used it for Releases, where we create an empty Parent Update Set and relate Update Sets to be included in the release as children.

Pros

• Can remove individual items from the release at the last moment.
• Similar to merging, except you can essentially unmerge but unrelating a child at any time
• Easy to deploy, only need to commit Parent Update Set
• More Granular Update Sets makes it easier to tie changes to requirements and documentation

Cons

???

There isn't much information on it at the moment, especially around Best Practices, so I thought I would reach out and see what the Community Experience is so far.

Will you keep merging Update Sets, or will you start batching? Is this the way forward?

[Daniel Billing]

No idea if its best practice, but we create a new ”parent” set i Test ... after the original batch set and the fixes has been tested sucessfully we attach them to the ”new” parent.

[The SN Nerd]

I second this.

My release will always have one parent Update Set that all others are related to, regardless of how many additions there are along the way.

AR You can find the Best Practices for Update Sets here

[matthei]

I tend to split work across multiple update sets, and set them to Ignore until I'm ready to move to the next environment. I also number them so anyone knows the order in which to apply them. The only issues I've found is preview can throw up errors with a update if the creation of fields referred to are in an update not yet committed.

[kevinanderson]

We have large deployments where the list of update sets and batches of update sets are in multiple application scopes.  Maybe as many as 5 or 10 different scopes in a release.  What is best practice when dealing with creating batches of update sets across application scopes? 

[The SN Nerd]

You can't commit an Update Set if any updates are in a different scope from the Set. 

If I am working in multiple scopes for a single release I just have my Global Scope as the parent and each application scope as a self contained child Update Set. 

When you are finished, close your Parent Set and deploy as a Batch.

My ProTip would be to download SNG-Smarter Update Sets-v1.3 from http://updatesets.snc.guru/, which has an option to prevent you from closing Sets with mixed scopes.