If your team releases on a schedule, you may see your release failing validation due to the inclusion of features that require manual pre-deployment steps. For teams where these pre-deployment steps cannot be completed until closer to release day, this failed validation makes it difficult to identify any additional unresolved issues.

For example, your team is trying to remove a value from a controlling picklist that is referenced by another picklist. They have deleted the value from the controlling picklist, and removed the controllingFieldValue from the dependent picklist in the sandbox. The validation of this feature will fail validation, as the deletion of a field dependency value is not supported by the MDAPI, and Salesforce will continue finding the reference in the dependent picklist. Only once the field dependency is manually deleted in the target sandbox as a pre-deployment step will the feature pass validation.

This means that any release that contains this feature will throw a validation error, which may obscure potential other validation errors from the rest of the features in the release.

On the Releases tab where you are seeing the failed validation, you can click into "View details".

From here, click into "View comparison results" to see the exact components that were validated from the release branch to the org.

You can now flexibly de-select the component(s) that are causing the failed validation because of uncompleted pre-deployment steps.

Finally, you can run a validation from the updated selection to the org (if you have the correct permissions assigned).

This should give your team confidence that all other components in a release will successfully validate, except for those requiring specific manual pre-deployment steps.