Pain-free Upgrades Explained: How our approach removes the hassle and expense from Adobe Commerce version upgrades

It’s the industry’s worst kept secret: Adobe Commerce version upgrades  can be disruptive and costly. But not with GENE. 

To understand how we deliver on that promise, we sat down with our Client Services Director, Duncan Copeland, and Head of Ecommerce Operations, Angela Milne, to uncover how we’ve adapted our process and commercial proposition to remove the hassle for Adobe Commerce and Magento merchants.

Questions for Angela Milne (Head of Ecommerce Operations):

Hi Angela! Let’s start with a common question: 

What are the key obstacles you’ve encountered when managing upgrades for Adobe Commerce platforms?

One of the biggest challenges we face when managing upgrades for Adobe Commerce platforms is dealing with all the (often legacy) customisation. All retailers want their online store to reflect their unique brand and meet their specific needs. But it’s those customizations that can often clash with the new version, causing unexpected errors. 

And let’s not forget about the amount of third-party extensions that the ecosystem relies on. Wrangling all these extensions and making sure they play nicely with the new version can be a real challenge. Some of them might need updates or even replacements altogether! 

Could you share how our agency approaches upgrades differently to minimise disruption for clients? 

Managing environments is key. Our approach focuses on having an upgrade environment running in parallel with our staging environment; this ensures new feature development can incrementally be merged with the upgrade environment to keep everything in sync. This continuous delivery model means we can be one step behind Adobe and take advantage of our automation test suite to identify any core issues that we need to resolve as we go.   

To mitigate issues with 3rd party extensions, we upgrade these as part of our Adobe Commerce upgrade process too. This gives our clients the latest features and functionality, but also keeps us in line with the 3rd party upgrade path. 

For this approach to work, test automations and our team of knowledgeable solution specialists are vital, this combination allows us to identify any issues quickly and document known issues for future upgrades. 

What advice would you offer to businesses considering an upgrade but feeling uncertain?

As an industry we need to remove the fear around upgrades, they’re an opportunity to improve security, performance and code quality. Think of it as an investment that’s going to benefit your business incrementally.

If you manage multiple sites, establish a base instance for testing upgrades before rolling them out to others. This approach streamlines the process and allows for reuse of customised modules.

Lastly, always consider future upgrades from the start of development. Follow best practices and coding standards to ensure smoother transitions. It’s about setting yourself up for success from day one!

Questions for Duncan Copeland (Client Services Director):

Hi Duncan! How do you typically communicate the importance of upgrades to clients?

The importance of upgrades is something we are very up front about from the very start of our relationship with any client. Staying one step behind Adobe is key, not only to ensure you’re fully supported, but delaying only increases your technical debt and increases the upgrade challenge further down the line.

What are the primary concerns clients express about upgrading their Adobe Commerce platform?

Cost and disruption. Which is exactly why we’ve worked so hard on not only our technical approach but also our commercial proposition. We want to eliminate these challenges and remove the unnecessary stigma that surrounds Adobe Commerce and Magento upgrades.

It’s therefore vital that we get all of our upgrades complete and out of the door with no disruption to the ongoing roadmap so our teams can focus on projects that deliver ROI. 

Could you walk us through a recent upgrade project that you found particularly successful?

All of our recent 2.4.6 upgrades were a big success, the smoothest version jump yet. Clients really noticed the impact of our new approach, commenting not only how smooth the process was, but how fast too!

“It was an absolutely BRILLIANT upgrade deploy – without a doubt the smoothest I’ve ever experienced” Nick Lane, Incontinence Choice

Want to chat more about upgrades? Shoot us a message using the form below, and we will be in touch.