Kathy Froelich from McDonalds recently sat down as a part of Quest’s Cloud HCM Week to reveal how they handle release management for Oracle Cloud HCM in hopes to help other customers leverage what McDonald’s has learned so that they can apply it to their own releases and enjoy a streamlined approach to successful release management. While every business is different, these tips can help mitigate risk and offer valuable insights into handling releases and testing.

Release Management Tips from McDonalds

McDonalds went live on HCM Payroll in July 2021. They run HCM Time & Labor, Payroll, and Absence Management for the U.S. and Canada, with expectations to expand HCM Cloud capabilities to their business processes in other parts of the world.

The Cloud HCM release management approach at McDonalds is an evolving process. Since go-live in July 2021, the team at McDonalds has worked to make the process more effective and focused.

McDonalds divides their release into two phases: before and during.

This applies to dropping into the lower environments. There are four important steps that need to occur to prepare before dropping into the lower environment:

Before Lower Environment Drop

1. The Application Maintenance and Support partner goes over the Oracle release documentation and prepares a series of presentations specific to the products used at McDonald’s.
2. The team meets several times as a combined tech and HR/Payroll business team to go over the presentations.
3. They determine any optional features desired to test and plan to enable those features.*
4. The QA team performs a comprehensive regression test suite for the review. New scenarios are added if needed.

For future updates, McDonald’s hopes to determine optional features desired to test at an earlier point in the release management preparation. 

During Lower Environment Drop

1. The QA team begins regression testing with highest priority scenarios tested in week 1. These include all payroll runs and critical reports.
2. Regression test results are reviewed after week 1 with the full team. Daily results are published. Serious concerns are raised immediately.
3. The QA team continues with additional test scenarios in week 2.
4. Toward the end of week 1, the business team completes UAT of new/optional features.
5. Just before the production drop, the business team meets with QA and all UAT testers to go over anything they have concerns about or want to watch after the production drop.
6. So far, the team has not discovered anything that would make them reach out to Oracle to delay the drop. They try to prioritize testing of critical processes early in the testing cycle to ensure they could get to Oracle in a timely manner if needed.

For a recent release, McDonalds went through approximately 400 test cases to prioritize. This was intentionally designed for the first week to make sure nothing in the release would unexpectedly impact a payroll run. It covered running all payroll runs, including restaurant payroll runs in regression testing.

Release Management Lessons Learned

At an earlier release, McDonald’s was worried that payroll would be impacted based on what they had seen during the QA. Luckily for McDonald’s, what was seen in QA didn’t come to pass in production, but it was a nail-biter. That experience helped the team to identify the importance of doing the most critical testing in the first week and leaving the remainder of testing or re-testing for the following weeks. They reach out to Oracle immediately if they’re concerned about anything.

To hear everything Kathy had to say, considering watching the full Cloud HCM Week session recording: HCM Cloud Community Release Management Roundtable.

For more on Oracle Cloud HCM, check out Quest’s Content Library.

To connect with other Cloud HCM users, you may considering joining Quest’s Cloud HCM Community.