Here at PwC we have some big news to share with you! We have just released our latest product on the Appexchange: Rellex (RELease & Lightning EXperience), an agile project and release management tool completely built on the Salesforce platform. Now sit back and relax and allow me to introduce Rellex.
Take the pain out of your Salesforce deployments
The idea behind Rellex was born from our own multi-year experience as a Salesforce implementation partner. We all felt the pain of moving configuration files, better known as metadata, from one environment to another. In a typical project you start by defining your high level requirements which will eventually become your user stories. Next, you start planning your work, i.e. if you are working in an Agile fashion, you typically divide your stories into multiple sprints.
Let’s fast forward a bit. Imagine you have completed your first sprint. As part of your stories you created a bunch of objects, fields, layouts, list views, you name it. Now it’s time to deploy these changes to another environment. Using the standard methods you would start creating a new changeset. Here comes the fun part. What did you change? Are you able to remember what changed four weeks ago as part of a user story? Were there any manual actions to take? Needless to say we are professionals and we are able to figure out what has to be deployed… eventually.
When deploying from one environment to another it’s not always easy to figure out what metadata should be moved. Most of the time, you are working on multiple requirements and after a while you simply forget what you changed or added. Some of us got really good at tracking everything in a text/excel file or for the daredevils among us, with a pen and paper.
Bottom line, we found using the deployment standard approach time-consuming, especially for bigger deployments where a lot of metadata changes are involved. And yes, I’m not even mentioning how “EASY” it is to create a changeset and add each single metadata file to it. For those of you not familiar with changesets, that last part was sarcasm, it wasn’t easy… at all.
Make your Salesforce deployments easier with Rellex
So now that we have given the elephant in the room a name, let’s have a look at how we handle these problems with Rellex.
In the first place, Rellex is an Agile project management tool. It provides you with all the functionality you need to keep track of your project requirements. You can create projects, releases, sprints and user stories. On top of that, you can use our boards to easily manage your sprints and even plan your backlog items.
Secondly and more importantly, Rellex is also a release management tool specifically aimed at Salesforce deployments. Our main incentive is to reduce the amount of time you spend preparing a changeset and performing the deployment.
With Rellex we do this by moving the moment you link the metadata. Normally you would do that by creating a changeset at the end of your sprint or your release. With Rellex you will do this while working on or just after finishing a user story. How you say? Well simply by linking metadata directly to your user story.
Let’s say you created two fields as part of story A. You can then use Rellex to link those two fields to story A. This way you are tracking what metadata has changed directly on the user story. Of course we made sure that linking of metadata would be easier than before by providing you with more filtering options and a table selection that actually works.
No more linking to changesets, instead link it to user stories, check.
How then can I move my metadata from one environment to the other? Simple! Deploy the user stories using Rellex built-in deployment functionality. This one allows you to package user stories or even full sprints for deployment. All the metadata that you previously linked to the user stories will be used to perform the deployment. You simply select a source and a target environment and you’re good to go!
For more info about Rellex please visit the product page.
The app is now available on the Appexchange. You can even ask for a free 30-day trial. Go check it out here!
This article was written by Lieven Juwet
