One of the common issues when we release new features and changes to our production org is the risk of existing features breaking or not working as expected resulting in long hours of support time to fix them. Here is a simple approach which you should follow to minimize your production issues.
a. Test your changes on production copy sandbox.
If you are having a full copy sandbox , ensure that it is refreshed every month from production . Deploy your changeset to full copy sandbox and test it on the sandbox. This would help you to identify issues before rolling to production.
b. Test data migration or uploads in full copy sandbox prior to loading in production
If you are planning to do data uploads or data migration tasks, you can test it in the full copy sandbox. This would help to identify any governor limit exceptions caused by bad trigger code or workflow field updates.
c. Test security and data access testing with real data using your current users.
If your changes involve profile or security permission changes, testing the changes against the full copy sandbox would help users to identify any data access or permission issues. One of the things you can do is have some real users to test your changes in the full copy sandbox with a month old opportunity or account. This would help to test real production scenarios and also involve the users to validate your change.
So following the 3 simple guidance rules, you can avoid issues in production rollouts in your org. Please click like if you like my post and please reply to buyan@sforcemaximizer.com for any further questions.