Salesforce has quickly become the industry-standard CRM system. As businesses expect more from the platform there’s a growing need for development solutions and practices that can keep up.
This is where DevOps steps in. Whether you’re a Salesforce admin, release manager, low-code or pro-code developer, read on to find out how DevOps can help your team work together to streamline your deployment process.
What is Salesforce DevOps?
Although new to the Salesforce ecosystem, DevOps is a method of collaborative working that has been creating a buzz in software development for a while already. When applied to Salesforce, DevOps brings together everyone involved in the development lifecycle — including developers, admins, team leads and release managers. By breaking down silos and encouraging collaboration, teams can build releases faster, efficiently and more securely.
Why should teams adopt DevOps for Salesforce?
DevOps might seem a little intimidating, particularly if you’re unfamiliar with some of the tools and processes involved. But DevOps for Salesforce isn’t just valuable for developers. The increasing availability of low-code DevOps solutions has opened the door for more members of Salesforce teams, regardless of their role or experience level. Declarative DevOps platforms make DevOps easily accessible to Salesforce admins or ‘clicks, not code’ developers can deploy changes declaratively, helping everyone in your team to share responsibility and work together effectively.
If your team implements DevOps, here are some of the benefits you can expect to see:
- Increased visibility between source and target orgs, leading to greater collaboration across and within development teams
- Reduced duplication and improved efficiency, saving time previously spent on complex manual processes
- Better release quality and fewer errors and bugs through automated testing and deployment
- Increased security and data integrity thanks to monitoring and backups
What does Salesforce DevOps involve?
DevOps is all about collaboration, drawing together development teams and release management processes that would otherwise be separated into silos. DevOps-driven Salesforce deployments mean everyone can see and drive the entire process from build to release.
Metadata deployments are the foundation of any Salesforce release process, whether you’re implementing DevOps or not. Before you start building a DevOps process you’ll want to make sure your deployment solution is manageable and reliable. If your deployments aren’t yet DevOps-ready, here’s a free course on DevOps Launchpad that can help you get started.
Let’s take a look at some of the key tools and processes that form a mature DevOps process:
Version control tools enable you to track changes in your org and easily review your contributions. Your team can work on the same features at the same time without overwriting each other’s code.
Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools take the pain and risk out of manual Salesforce deployments by automatically integrating code and moving changes along the release pipeline, reducing time spent on repetitive tasks and helping teams to release frequent small changes.
Automated testing tools improve code quality by speeding up your code review process, catching errors early and tracking code coverage across your orgs.
Backup tools keep copies of your metadata and data, so you can recover rapidly when incidents arise and minimize downtime.
Monitoring tools help you to quickly spot unexpected metadata changes to your live environment, so you can easily keep earlier environments in sync with backpropagation or roll back any changes you don’t want to keep.
How to get started with Salesforce DevOps
Adopting DevOps doesn’t have to look like lots of big changes all at once. In fact, trying to adopt DevOps in one ‘big bang’ tends to be much slower and a lot more painful. Instead, small incremental changes mean you can build up to DevOps maturity over time while still delivering value to end users as you ramp. For example, once you’re reliably and successfully deploying org-to-org, you can begin to layer in version control — but if your deployments aren’t regularly succeeding, implementing version control may just add more complexity and difficulty to your release process. Once you’ve established a source driven workflow, automation can be layered in as you work towards continuous delivery.
But deciding on your DevOps strategy doesn’t need to be time-consuming. Whether you’re just starting out or already on the way to integrating DevOps into your release process, taking the DevOps Assessment will give a full report of the maturity of your current set up as well as areas for improvement and next steps. Once you know what challenges your team faces across deployment, release management, backup and recovery, you can begin exploring which DevOps platforms and expertise will best support your adoption journey.
How to measure the performance of your Salesforce DevOps solution
As you’re working out what kind of DevOps solution your team needs, it can help to establish shared measures of success. The DORA metrics can help your team assess how effectively you’re implementing DevOps processes and highlight areas of weakness so you can continue to iterate and improve.
The original DORA metrics focus on four key factors:
- Deployment Frequency: how often an organization releases to production
- Lead Time for Changes: the amount of time it takes to get a completed feature to production
- Mean Time to Recover: the time it takes to restore service after a failure in production
- Change Failure Rate: the percentage of deployments with bugs or errors
The DORA metrics are a great way to demonstrate the value of the transition to a full DevOps process, helping to keep key stakeholders bought in as you establish what you want to achieve through implementing DevOps.
Key considerations for choosing a Salesforce DevOps solution
When you come to build your DevOps toolchain, you’ll see that there are plenty of options out there, with solutions offering both standalone tools as well as more comprehensive all-in-one platforms. Here are some key considerations to keep in mind, to make sure you’re finding the solution that fits your team.
What process do you want to reach?
Keep in mind your end goal and DevOps strategy — you’ll want to make sure the solution you choose can meet you where you are and scale with you as your team and business grows. Will your solution still be the best option for team collaboration now and as your processes develop? It’s worth finding a solution that can handle version control, CI/CD and other elements of a mature DevOps process before you need them.
What solution will work for the entire team?
Your DevOps approach needs to empower your whole Salesforce development team — if your team ends up split between different solutions, it can create the silos that DevOps principles aim to break down. So it’s also important to consider whether a Salesforce DevOps solution is flexible enough to work for your whole team, whether they are developers, admins or release managers.
What budget are you working with?
Native solutions, like DevOps Center and change sets, can seem like cost effective options in the short-term as they’re free. But if you want to maximize your budget, you won’t want to miss out on the long-term ROI that can be achieved with a mature DevOps process.
The State of Salesforce DevOps 2024 report found that 97% of all teams saw a monthly return on investment from Salesforce DevOps and the amount of return increased the more mature their DevOps setup was. It’s clear that investment in a complete DevOps process at the start of your journey can pay for itself in the long run.
What are your security and compliance requirements?
Businesses tend to house personal customer data in their orgs which typically means these orgs need to be compliant with different security frameworks. It’s important to understand which regulations apply to your orgs, to make sure your Salesforce DevOps process and chosen solution are compliant with the security frameworks you’re working with. For example, do you need a solution that can add gating to your release process to support SOX compliance? Or are you in the healthcare space and need the solution to be HIPAA compliant?
What’s your company’s existing tech stack?
It’s likely that your company already has DevOps tools in place for other business systems. For example, there may be teams already up and running with GitHub for version control or Jira for user stories. Finding a DevOps solution that can integrate with this existing tech stack will save time on lengthy procurement processes. It also means there’ll be people within the business who can help get you up and running with the integrated platforms.
Gearset: the end-to-end DevOps solution for Salesforce
Over the past 10 years, Gearset has built a scalable Salesforce DevOps solution that goes beyond just deployment. Gearset integrates with your existing tech stack, so there’s no need to make changes to your tried and tested workflow.
You can quickly get up and running, with nothing to download and nothing to install in your orgs. And once you’ve got started, you don’t need to worry about ongoing support and training because Gearset’s team are on hand at every stage of the DevOps lifecycle, investing the time to understand your use case and business needs.
Ultimately, when you’re looking for a DevOps solution, you’ll want to be sure it can support your whole team to work together. Whether you’re a no-code or low-code Salesforce admin or developer, you’ll find that Gearset offers everything your team needs to get started with DevOps all wrapped up in one app. By managing DevOps end-to-end in one solution, your team can focus on delivering results for your end-users.
Find the right DevOps solution for your team
Investing in the right DevOps platform will streamline your Salesforce release process, and empower your team to deliver secure releases quickly. Get in touch for a tailored demo of Gearset’s complete Salesforce DevOps solution or try it for yourself with a free 30-day trial.
