How frequently do you do the upgrade?

[Suggy]

Just curious to know like how frequently do you do the upgrade.

Do you upgrade of EACH and every release or do it early once (like Q1 or Q3- which quarter you prefer?) 

Is there any recommendations from ServiceNow on this? Just curious to know how you are doing it today 🙂

[Musab Rasheed]

Hi Suggy,

It is better to perform family/feature upgrade at least once in an year or twice in an year. depends on Feature release of Servicenow, as of now servicenow is releasing at least two feature release each year hence plan to do depending on their release. Below are the types of Upgrades.

Feature	Introduces new features Includes all available fixes to existing functionality Is production-oriented; quality and stability are of the highest priority throughout the lifecycle
Patch	Supports existing functionality with a collection of problem fixes Generally does not include new features
Hot Fix	Supports existing functionality with a specific problem fix for a feature release May or may not include any previous fixes for a given release Does not include new features

Patch and Hot fix are generally scheduled by servicenow and we have to perform that upgrade based on our needs but cannot be cancelled and we can scheduled Patch and hot fix manually based on our need. Also, feature upgrade is nothing but Family upgrade like Qubec, Rome, San diago go on...

Suppose your instance is on Qubec now and Servicenow has recently release San Diago hence you are lagging by at least two feature release hence servicenow recommends you to upgrade directly to San diago latest patch or Older patch of Rome depends on how long San diago is live. Kindly follow few links and learn more about Upgrades. Mark my answer as correct or hit like based on impact.

https://www.inry.com/insights/10-technical-best-practices-for-a-seamless-servicenow-upgrade

https://www.servicenow.com/success/instance-upgrades/upgrade-best-practices.html

https://infocenter.io/best-practices-tips-upgrading-servicenow/https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/sandiego-release-notes/page/release-notes/upgrades/reference/upgrade.html

https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/public/en-us/doc-type/success/quick-answer/how-to-upgrade.pdf

Regards,

Musab

[Pat Espin]

Hi Suggy,

We have established a pattern of doing major city upgrades twice a year, in May and early December.  This pattern typically trails ServiceNow's release by about two months.  We do this intentionally so that a patch or two is available to fix any bugs before we move to a release.  

We also do the monthly patches, especially the security patches in the first month of each quarter.

A key thing that enables us to achieve this upgrade pattern while still having maintaining our development workload is having good testing practices as well as automated testing.  When we first started with ServiceNow it was very inconvenient to upgrade because we had to really reduce our workload for a month while the team tested.  We are now able to maintain 80-90% of our workload during release months.

Another key thing is to have an repeatable upgrade pattern (like a project plan) which defines how much lead time you need before go live, when you enter into each environment so as to not interrupt development, key checkpoints, etc.

Hope that helps.

~Pat

[Suggy]

Hi @Pat Espin If you are using ATF, I believe you would need to update the test cases by reviewing the release notes and then do the upgrade right? If not, please shed some light on this.

Thank you.

[Ann43]

We do a major city upgrade once a year in Q1.  The choice to upgrade in Q1 just worked out that way when we were due for an upgrade.  Participating in the Early Release Program has really helped with our upgrade schedule/pattern to happen only once a year.  We use to upgrade twice a year.