EP072 How to Approach Adobe Commerce Upgrade Without Jumping into a Rabbit Hole of Hours
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[00:00:00] Darin Newbold: Welcome, everyone. And good day. This is Commerce Today. My name is Darin Newbold, your host, and very excited to have a wonderful, wonderful guest, Anna Krzyzanska, which is one of our solution architects here at Creatuity. And we're very excited to have her on board because this is an opportunity to talk about something that's very near and dear to your heart, and And that is how to approach a Adobe Commerce upgrade without jumping into that crazy rabbit hole of ours.

So welcome, Anna. We're happy to have you. 

[00:00:41] Anna Krzyzanska: I'm so excited to be here. Thank you, Darin, for an invitation. 

[00:00:45] Darin Newbold: You're very welcome. Well, let's let's jump into this, because I know you have several things here. So, first and foremost, when someone's deciding to do an Adobe Commerce upgrade, what do they need to look at?

What are some things that are important, and what's important from your perspective that they need to be looking at? 

[00:01:01] Anna Krzyzanska: I think there's a few things you can start with, but I have my own kind of list of steps what you can do. And no matter what is your position in the Adobe Commerce project you're running, I think the best would be to start with checking how many customizations you have done on your store.

Also how many, you know, maybe some extensions were both in Adobe commerce marketplace. That's also very important to do. And this is probably where you should start to, to make a list of all those changes you did on Adobe commerce platform. 

[00:01:36] Darin Newbold: Well, I can only imagine that that is very, very key.

Once you have that list, what's one of the most important things to do kind of next steps as you look at that list. 

[00:01:46] Anna Krzyzanska: Oh, for sure. The first thing you need to check if that extensions you both and install on your platform. If they are already compatible with the package you want to upgrade with your Adobe commerce, because if not, it can actually, you know, create some additional hours that your dev team probably will need to spend to fix some issues that will come with, you know, that not compatible package you have right now.

[00:02:14] Darin Newbold: Because they end up in those situations where we have a basically the dev team that has to do, customizations and basically rewrite things so that it works. So it works with the new upgrade versus it works right out of the box. Right, right from the start. 

[00:02:29] Anna Krzyzanska: Yeah. I recommend in that case, if something is not still compatible to wait a little bit, not rush with that upgrade and wait until all the extensions you have being compatible with the package.

Yeah, that's my recommendation for sure. 

[00:02:45] Darin Newbold: Okay. So that gets us kind of into that preparing of the upgrade. And you said list of the modules and the extensions and, and really building that out and making sure that there's a compatibility check. what about vendors? How does that play into this preparation for this upgrade?

[00:03:03] Anna Krzyzanska: To be honest I would say that. the knowledge base for you, basically, if you have any questions, you can always, you know, contact with your vendor and check with them about that package. You can also check with them when they will prepare this compatible package. They most likely will have some answers for you.

Yeah, and I would just listen to them in that case. 

[00:03:24] Darin Newbold: Okay. Perfect. So we've got our preparation. We've built out our list. We've checked it twice to make sure who's naughty and nice. So once we have that done kind of looking at kind of this, you know, as you've had it listed here and we'll have, we'll have this for our show notes as well.

Kind of this, the next step the, the analytical steps before upgrading. Tell me about those and tell me why you see those as important and how best to approach. 

[00:03:52] Anna Krzyzanska: Yeah, I think the next step for me, if I would have already done this list of extensions would be actually checking the release notes of the package I want to go with.

And this release notes is a very, very long text you need to type. And for some, it can be scary for some people to read it, especially that is very technical release note approach from other e commerce. So if you're not a technical person, you can struggle with understanding what's going on.

And what we do in creativity, what I do myself is actually, I'm preparing a special spreadsheet where I take those release notes and group them by project areas. So the client and also a dev team, anyone who will participate in Magento upgrade can actually get like this bigger picture of what is happening with that upgrade, that's, that's great.

And that helped a lot of people to understand what's going on. And also it's good for us to understand how big it is. So how many hours it can, it will probably take to make this Magento upgrade, because there are some packages that are smaller. There are some packages that are more complicated and we need to know that.

We need to be able to analyze it somehow. So that's what we do. We make that spreadsheet. Sometimes we send it to our clients. Sometimes we use it only internally, but it's a great help. 

[00:05:21] Darin Newbold: That sounds awesome. That sounds like that would really, really help get things more organized and it does put a situation, put it into perspective potentially for the client if you share it with them and so that they can see every the impact of this upgrade potentially may have.

So what's next on that on the analysis side or the analytical steps that you're looking at? I'm sure we have to set up some type of testing environment. Okay. 

[00:05:47] Anna Krzyzanska: Yeah, for sure. We need a testing environment. In many cases we recommend to have like some kind of separate environment that is strictly done only to make an upgrade there until you will, before you will go with that upgrade life.

And that also is good because we can actually make a copy of your life project. and put in all the changes from Magento upgrade there and check what's not working. But I would say that this is actually a little bit like a development phase. What I would also do before that is actually like putting together all the things we talked about, like the spreadsheet, the list of extensions, put it all together, make a discussion and make a nice and very specific.

discovery phase for that project, for any kind of project. Because if we will make that discovery phase, it will probably save a bunch of hours for our clients because we will know exactly what's going on with the project and exactly what will be done with that project when we make an upgrade. Then we can actually go with that testing environment, prepare it.

And go with it and check what's working, what's not working. Maybe you missed something. You always can miss something like a very small details. But also what you need to check is if those extensions you installed, if they didn't change any logic behind their product, because sometimes, very rare, some products change the logic because they need to become compatible with the newest package.

So, so sometimes you can find this scenario where you installed the module that was working perfectly for you. And it stopped working because the logic had to change because the logic of the code was changed in the upgrade. So this is a rare situation, but we need to remember about situations like that.

And that discovery phase can actually prevent that. 

[00:07:52] Darin Newbold: That's important. So it sounds like that's the best practice to keep in mind is that discovery piece. of this process because without it, without it, things get missed and you run into it. Potentially run into problems later on now. Nothing's perfect. So things things can still get missed, but it's one of those ways to eliminate eliminate potential problems.

So what about performance? Once we have this testing environments, do we need to? I mean, obviously, we want to make sure that it's running as well. And ideally. Better than it previously ran, correct? 

[00:08:28] Anna Krzyzanska: Yeah, that's correct. And because of that, we need to make any kind of test we can basically, if we are, you know, able to, to check the performance of each side, we should do it.

If we have a budget for it, we should do it. We always ask for that budget for sure. That's also some part of the discovery phase after all the testing, but it is a development in.

And what is important is to keep a very detailed note of what we found in the middle of those testing processes make it, you know, write down, it cannot be a discussion in a group, it cannot be anything like that you need to wrote down, have a detailed notes and also have a detailed plan, step by step, how you want to approach that specific Adobe Commerce upgrade.

Upgrade. 

[00:09:20] Darin Newbold: Gotcha, gotcha. Well, let's switch gears a little bit and let's, let's talk about, let's talk about the rabbit hole. We talked about, hey, here are some steps to get prepared for it and everything, but let's avoid some of that time, time situation. So, how do we manage time expectations and, and the varied time frames of, of different things?

[00:09:40] Anna Krzyzanska: From my perspective, in many cases I hear that someone would like to get like a one very nice Maybe not that big estimation for the upgrade of Magento But what I recommend and what we always try to do Here in Creatuity is to approach with like a discovery phase first So we estimate how long it will take to make a discovery phase.

And based on that discovery phase, we can actually give you some kind of range of hours that will take the development phase of Magento upgrade. That way, those numbers will be more realistic than giving you some kind of. range of hours before that discovery phase, because we don't know what's in that rabbit hole yet, as you said.

So to avoid that, we need to actually jump in like a little bit and check what's around, what's going on around how many, you know, things are around. What, how many stones we need to move, you know, to go and go deeper and deeper in that rabbit hole. But if that will be the first step to actually discover how, you know, how deep is that all that will help us and the team, the team really appreciate when they know that they have a time for discovery phase, because they have a time to think.

And that's very crucial when it comes to the big commerce upgrade. I 

[00:11:10] Darin Newbold: can only imagine. So really, the one of the biggest things is, is it's all about the preparation and, and taking the time to know what's, what's in there and where the problems could be, but knowing as many of them in advance as possible through this discovery phase is the key.

Would you ever have a situation where after a discovery phase, you might. Either significantly increase the number of hours it might, this upgrade might take, or even the opposite, significantly decrease and say, well, hey, this is not nearly as complex as maybe we originally saw it. 

[00:11:47] Anna Krzyzanska: I actually had both scenarios, like both scenarios, they happen.

There is sometimes a time you know, problem. Because of many, many different things in most cases, those are the projects there where there's a lot of customization that were done by many, many different agencies, you know, and you have some legacy code that you know what that code Does actually, but when it comes to upgrade, something is not working and then you need to fix it and figure it out one more time, or maybe rewrite it.

And because of that, this time can exceed. But I also had scenarios when someone was thinking like, Oh my God, this will be a huge project to do. This will be as like a sub project for our project because of that upgrade. And after all, it happened like, Oh, okay. So it's not that complicated because the client has a lot of extensions, just both on marketplace.

So we just need to figure it out that list I talked about at the beginning and then, you know, everything just went smooth. So it all depends. And that's why we need to ask those questions. Like what is in my project? What customizations did I do? On what environment I'm running my application of Adobe commerce right now.

All those questions and this discovery phase will prepare your business for those costs and will also, you know, prevent from situations like that, like when you don't know what is going on and you need to spend time checking like, okay, it just blown up. Like I just make an upgrade. Anything, everything is not working in the project.

What, what do I do now? And, You know, developers in that situation, this is a stressful situation. So it's hard to think, so it takes much more time, you know, so everything depends on everything in that case. 

[00:13:41] Darin Newbold: It does. And it, it's, it's a cascade of of how you approach it, but really this, this two phased approach of discovery and then implementation.

Is is so very, very important. Well, as we kind of get a little closer to kind of closing this up, I wanted to have you maybe run through quickly, kind of, summarize, if you will, the best practices for for a smooth upgrade. What do those look like and kind of help everyone that's listening to those that are listening that they can kind of walk away with maybe a checklist of of a variety.

[00:14:15] Anna Krzyzanska: Okay. So I think the summary would be prepare the list of all the customizations you have on your store. You need to know about those customizations. If you don't, there will be a trouble. Check your environment on what environment your application is running. Check with the experts. They know their stuff.

They will tell you everything that you need in non technical way, for sure. Then check the release notes. If you cannot understand it, ask someone to prepare you a non technical version of release notes. It's possible. I know it. That's the version 

[00:14:52] Darin Newbold: I need. 

[00:14:53] Anna Krzyzanska: Yeah. Then of course be sure that you have an environment when you, where you can test it easily with no rush.

And you know that the team that will test it have time for it and be open for a discovery phase. That would be my recommendations. 

[00:15:13] Darin Newbold: Well, that sounds like, that sounds like a perfect, perfect scenario uh, putting this all together. There's a few other things that I know that when we prep for this that you had kind of as part of the show notes and we want to share those with you because there are, there are some things beyond what, what we've been able to share with you here about ensuring you have some vendor support as well as security enhancements.

And one of the things that, let me ask you this real quick. Don't you feel that one of the things that's most often overlooked in upgrades and stuff is the, is user training.

[00:15:48] Anna Krzyzanska: From my perspective, I never saw like there are in those upgrades, like a lot of changes that would impact the user experience. Of your business. But for sure we need to, it is important to remember that any extension you added in Magento can change its logic. So that's why we need you know, a lot of testing and a testing environment only for that to make sure that when we will test, for example, a storefront of Adobe commerce, we will know that nothing changed when it comes to user experience you know, the happy path of, for the customer that every, every step is the same and it's working.

I don't think it's overlooked. I think it's a part of something bigger. Maybe it's overlooked, in the list of steps, but this is basically part of testing, I think, a testing phase. So yeah, I think it's there. You always check the, the user experience paths, the kind you have on your business.

But it happens when you make a testing phase, basically. 

[00:16:58] Darin Newbold: Perfect. Well, Anna, I want to say thank you. Thank you very, very much for being a part of our show today. Part of the show notes Anna had created a kind of a decision tree and it's not something that's easily talked about, but it's much better in being able to see it.

So that'll be part of our show notes. As always, we uh, encourage you to subscribe To wherever you're listening to this, to our Commerce Today show. And as always, we thank you very much for tuning in. And again, thank you, Anna, and take care. Have a great day. 

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