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http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Saving_Customizations_in_a_Single_XML_File

About half of the code is what would have been the April / May / June 2014 release. As such, this code is completed, thoroughly tested, and UAT'd (twice). We would like to not save this work in a way that allows us to faithfully restore it at a later date.

Primitives

Applying update sets properly in this requires a few things working together:

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These are important for various reasons. Having the raw import sets doesn't do us as much good as you would expect. Most requirements, and even many defects are spread across multiple update sets. If those update sets are not applied in the appropriate order, the resulting changes will not represent those intended by the developer, or approved by the tester, or approved for release by the stakeholder.

How we get the apply order