Workday Release Readiness: The Complete R1 & R2 Guide
Workday R1 in March and R2 in September deprecate objects, rename fields, and shift default behaviour. Most tenants accumulate three to five undetected regressions per release cycle. This is the complete pre-release audit playbook — what to check in Preview, what to test before promotion, and how to catch every regression before update weekend.
Why a release audit is non-optional
Workday publishes the 'What's New' guide and the 'Release Notes' for every R1 and R2. Both documents enumerate hundreds of changes. Reading them is the start of release readiness; auditing your tenant against them is the rest of it. Without a pre-release audit, you are betting that none of the deprecations affect your specific configuration. In a tenant with 1,000+ calculated fields and 200+ integrations, that bet loses every cycle.
The five categories every release touches
- Calculated fields referencing soon-to-be-deprecated objects or fields.
- Business process steps using changed step types or default routing.
- Integrations using web services with changed response shapes.
- Security policies on domains where defaults are changing.
- Custom reports using deprecated data sources or fields.
The Preview promotion playbook
Workday gives you Preview 4–6 weeks before each release goes to production. Use it. Run the full scan in Preview as soon as it's available. Compare the findings to your last production scan — anything new in Preview is a release-induced regression you have weeks to fix instead of an after-the-fact incident. Re-run integrations in Preview against a sandbox of the downstream system. Spot-check business processes by initiating one transaction per BP type.
The seven incident classes that repeat every release
- Calculated field referencing deprecated object → report breaks.
- Business process step referencing renamed field → BP fails to initiate.
- Integration response field renamed → downstream system gets null.
- Default security policy change exposes new domain → unintended access.
- ISSG missing newly added domain → integration fails authentication.
- Custom report uses removed data source → report errors out.
- Studio integration uses deprecated step type → integration fails to compile.
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