Release family upgrades require detailed planning, testing, and communication.
We'll cover these areas as well as the upgrade process itself.
Each ServiceNow release family contains enhancements to platform functionality.
These enhancements may include new applications or features
that can improve operations, productivity and system performance.
Planning is critical for a smooth upgrade.
And the release notes are a good place to start.
They'll tell you about feature enhancements as well as functionality fixes, user interface changes,
browser support requirements, security improvements, and plugin updates.
Next, take a look at the upgrade planning checklist.
You can save it as a PDF to look at later.
The checklist contains seven phases.
These phases are great guidelines and milestones to use
when you write your upgrade plan and work out how much internal support you'll need.
Your plan should identify teams, their responsibilities,
and assign estimated time requirements to individuals.
Use the plan to get early buy-in from stakeholders and teams.
After you've formed teams, the second step is to take a look at
how many instances you own since this can impact the time it takes to upgrade.
The most common scenario is three instances.
Are any activities overlapping in the instances?
If so, coordinate a date and time to freeze activities
in both your development and test environments during the upgrade.
What's the first step in testing?
Start by using the Upgrade History module to see the records from recent upgrades.
Look for skipped, updated, inserted, or deleted objects.
Note any objects that were skipped so you can manage customizations efficiently.
Use the upgrade records to create comprehensive test plans
that include test cases for core system functionality
and regression test cases for active applications and integrations.
Thorough testing will save time in the long run,
and it'll help ensure that your instance is functioning properly
before the roll-back window closes.
Test teams will vary in size, but as a general rule: the more testers, the better.
Ideal testers include IT admins, engineers, and computer technicians.
To estimate a realistic time frame for upgrading the production instance itself,
clone the production instance onto a non-production instance
and use the upgrade monitor to time the upgrade.
Now, test individual areas on the cloned instance using the Automated Test Framework (or ATF)
to confirm that it still works like the production instance.
ATF facilitates and automates the regression testing portion of the upgrade process.
Start with a base platform test and set form fields to fit your business process.
You can reuse the customized tests later for upgrades or to modify an instance.
Because of this automation, ATF eliminates user error and streamlines the upgrade process.
After testing is complete,
schedule a walk-through with key stakeholders and the core upgrade team
and get their approval to upgrade your instances.
Let users and key stakeholders know how long instances will be down.
Tell them about new system features, how users will be impacted,
and how they should prepare for system changes.
Now you're ready to upgrade the cloned instance.
To begin, request an upgrade from ServiceNow Customer Support
and schedule a non-production instance upgrade.
Use the Upgrade Monitor to follow its progress,
and be sure to check for and reconcile any skipped updates after it's complete.
Once the upgrade is complete, do your ATF regression testing, track and fix any errors,
and create an upgrade process document that outlines the upgrade steps.
Be sure to include the errors you found and how to fix them.
Next, upgrade all other non-production instances.
When you've upgraded those instances successfully,
request an upgrade for your production instance.
Once the upgrade is complete, you can promote, preview, and commit update sets
that contain fixes from the non-production upgrades.
Then do ATF regression testing for all core functionality, applications and integrations.
Now validate the results.
Resume activities on non-production instances that were put on hold before the upgrade.
All instances should be in sync.
Tell your stakeholders and users that the upgraded instances are now available,
and share the supporting documentation with them.
A release family upgrade will give you a better platform experience and improve automation.
Early planning and testing with ATF are key to a smooth upgrade.
If you'd like to learn more about ATF, watch Getting Started with the Automated Test Framework.
For more information, please see our product documentation, knowledge base, or podcast.
Or ask a question in the ServiceNow Community.