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The Sign-Off Table
The Workday Release Testing Playbook

Week 1 of 8

The calendar you test to

Welcome to The Sign-Off Table. For the next 8 weeks you will get one practical move a week for testing Workday HCM, Payroll and Financials, in the order you will need them. After that, a weekly roundup of new research, guides and templates.

We start with the calendar, because Workday sets it, not you. There are two feature releases a year, R1 in March and R2 in September. Each one opens in your Sandbox Preview tenant about five weeks before it reaches production. Weekly service updates land in between. 2026R2 went to production on September 19; 2027R1 is next, in March.

This week: put both release windows on the calendar and staff them

  1. Mark the next two Release Preparation Windows: roughly mid-February to mid-March and mid-August to mid-September. Confirm the exact dates in the Release Center.
  2. Book your business testers for all five weeks of the next window now. Payroll, benefits and finance testers are the hardest to get.
  3. Agree a freeze on non-urgent configuration changes during each window, so a failure means the release, not your own change.
  4. Name one person who signs off each release, and decide what evidence they will sign on.
  5. Add weekly service updates to the calendar too. They are mostly disabled by default, but fixes and retirements still publish every week.

Number of the week

5 weeks

is the release preparation window in Sandbox Preview before each Workday feature release reaches production.

Source: Workday, Release Best Practices guide

Use this week

Next week: tenants. What each one is for, and what a refresh quietly wipes out.

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