Hi everyone! We are currently doing a massive revamp of our deployment strategies in our org. We currently have one Full sandbox, and a cluster of Dev Pro and Dev sandboxes. We all (all admins/devs - there are a decent # of us!) have the ability to configure in the production org (the horror!!! :scream:).

What we're trying to get happening is:

- Full sandbox = the UAT sandbox for any project related build - everything that needs testing with data, and/or end users to test and give feedback on needs to go here.

- 1 Dev Pro "Release" sandbox = refreshed monthly, for ALL config to be either built in or deployed to (from our other dev pro and dev sandboxes), prior to deploy so we can ensure 2 people are not making different changes to the same field/object/etc and we can run all test classes.

- Deploy at the end of each month from this "Release" sandbox, anything that was not a critical fix or a project scheduled for deploy at another point in the month

- Critical fixes need to be made in the "Release" sandbox ALWAYS before they can be made in our live environment - these can be deployed at any day in the month, as soon as they have passed tests

- Use our other Dev Pro and Dev sandboxes as playgrounds, so we can assign them to longer-term projects that won't be able to go out within our monthly deployment cycle, or areas for our less experienced admins to try things out and learn

- Policy of not letting these other Dev Pro and Dev sandboxes go more than about 2 months without refresh - even if we're not ready to deploy we would shuffle our config around so that we can push it back into that sandbox (mostly using change sets, but we have some REAL struggles with change sets!!!) and continue building in an environment that hasn't decayed too far.

We are open to ANY ideas or suggestions based on what we're looking at above! This is just our initial sketch of a plan - much like the science lab attached, I have no idea what we're doing.

Do you guys use any deployment apps or products that you would recommend? How does your deployment strategy work? Do you lock off the production org from everyone bar one or two people who can deploy?

Thanks!

CC: