Introduction
Many Salesforce developers and admins have counted on Copado Essentials to quickly and reliably deploy changes from one Salesforce org to another. As teams grow in size and complexity, it is imperative for teams to go beyond org-to-org deployments and start thinking about how to formulate a consistent release process with good control and governance in place. This is what Work Items was built for.
A Work Item is an encapsulation of a user story and its progression through a consistent change management process with approval, history, visibility and collaboration built-in.
Licensing
The Work Items feature requires Essentials Plus licenses. However, you can trial Work Items at anytime without an Essentials plus license, using the Free Trial button, for a trial period of 21 days. After the trial period ends, you would need to subscribe to an Essentials Plus license in order to continuing using Work Items.
Getting Started
Setting Up a Pipeline
To get started, sign in Copado Essentials as a user with the Team Owner or Team Lead role. Navigate to Account > Pipelines > Add Pipeline.
For each environment, enter the environment name and associate a Salesforce org with that environment.
After the pipeline is saved, it will be visible to all members within the team. However, before other members can use the pipeline, the owners of the associated Salesforce orgs in the pipeline must share org access to other team members.
Enable Git commits within a pipeline (optional)
Within a pipeline, you can also enable commits to a corresponding branch of a Git repository in the background. For pipelines that have this enabled, Copado Essentials automatically commits any deployed metadata changes to the configured git branch as soon as your work item is deployed successfully to the corresponding environment.
To enable version history for a pipeline, simply edit the pipeline, select the desired Git org and a corresponding branch for each environment, as below.
Work Item Approvals
Approvals are also a powerful feature to fortify your pipeline. When setting a pipeline, you can designate the minimum number of approvals required for changes to be deployed to the next stage. Approvers only need visibility into a Work Item, so this could be a Team Owner with visibility into all team deployments,or a Team Lead designated to a project or simply a more senior team member that you share a deployment with for additional oversight.
Create Work Items
Any member of the team can create work items. To create a work item, navigate to Work Items > New Work Item
Users are only required to enter the “Issue” field.
“Pipeline” field is automatically populated with the default pipeline configured by the team owner or team lead.
“Start from” environment is automatically populated based on the pipeline setting but users can choose to change the “Start from” environment.
Deploy Work Items
Users can perform various actions with work items including compare changes, add components, share deployment, comment on deployment, etc.
On successful deployment of a stage, the work item automatically progresses to the next stage.
If version history tracking is enabled for the pipeline, Copado Essentials automatically commits any deployed metadata changes to the corresponding git branch. You can view detail of the commit/history by clicking on the git branching icon next to each environment.
Optionally, users can go back to a previous stage if needed by clicking on More > Go Back to Previous Stage.
Permission levels (validate, deploy, view, manage) are applied at each stage of the pipeline based on the org sharing configuration.
Upon successful deployment of the final stage, the work item is considered complete and closed.