Background

In July 2014, the ITSM team decided to postpone the development work originally scheduled for release April 2014. That work was tracked here:

...

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

Primitives

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

• the update set exports themselves
• external information about the update sets:
• The appropriate apply order
• The status of the development work
• The status of any related testing
• The status of any related UAT

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.