Clone inbound change sets in 5 seconds

In this blog post, we discuss about the challenges of cloning inbound change sets using Salesforce out-of-the-box Change Sets UI and compare with the alternative approach using ClickDeploy.io.

Clone inbound change sets using Salesforce Change Sets.

One of the biggest pain points with Salesforce deployments using Change Sets is how difficult it is to reuse and clone inbound change sets. In fact, at the time of this writing, the only way to clone an inbound change set is to rebuild the entire change set manually. Not only is this extremely time consuming, it opens up many opportunities for errors. If you spend an hour manually rebuilding a change set of 200+ components, you are bound to miss a couple. And since it was rebuilt manually, there is no guarantee that the change that went to UAT was exactly the same as the one going to Production.

That is just the tip of the ice berg. The number of problems with change sets are far too many to be listed here. This clone inbound change set idea has over 1000 votes but has gained little traction. Why ? Salesforce definitely realized that Change Sets doesn’t need to be improved. It needs a complete redesign. Depending on how you look at it, Salesforce DX could be considered as a first step towards this redesign effort. In its current state, however, DX is far too technical to be considered as a direct answer to the problems that Change Sets are facing. The same can be said for Ant Migration Tool and Eclipse IDE.

If you are looking for a faster way to move changes across orgs, ClickDeploy.io might be the app for you.

Clone inbound change sets using ClickDeploy.io

At ClickDeploy.io, we continue to push the boundary and create Salesforce deployment experience that our users love. Among all the features that we’ve built so far, cloning change sets is probably the one feature that our users love the most.

Let’s take a look at what it takes to clone a deployment using ClickDeploy.io.

That is about a 5 seconds, whether you have 5 components in the list or 5000. Not only that, we retrieve metadata from the new source and target org, matching against your change list and show you the diff view in almost real-time. The ability to quickly review differences before deployment has been considered very useful, if not essential to many of our users.

At this point, in a typical deployment using Salesforce change set, you would need to perform the following steps:

With ClickDeploy.io, the process is:

Hope this post provided you with some useful info regarding the current challenges using change sets and how ClickDeploy.io could help to make the whole deployment process easier and faster.