The final diagram in this Salesforce diagram series is the release management diagram.
This is used when you’re using DevOps to manage and deploy changes between sandboxes and eventually to production.
It’s common to have a release branch for each major Salesforce instance. Major instances are often Development (DEV), System Integration Testing (SIT), User Acceptance Testing (UAT), and Production.
Minor instances are often for focused work, like for data migration testing, or 3rd party package testing. These instances can use the same branch as a major instance, such as SIT. Of course, if the 3rd party package requires changes, they need to be merged back into a release branch.
The master branch is the ultimate source of truth. It’s not usually connected to a Salesforce instance.
Here’s a sample diagram
The takeaway
While the details of release management are beyond the scope of this email, keeping track of how development moves from instance to instance is an important diagram to document.