Salesforce allows development teams to respond to changes in business requirements much more quickly than traditional platforms such as SQL Server or Oracle. When the need arises, the whole team, and especially admins, can make changes directly in the production org, bypassing the normal software development lifecycle.
However, organisations adopt a software development lifecycle and Agile practices for a reason! Changes made directly in the org can often be overwritten at a later date by a scheduled deployment, or not get the proper scrutiny they deserve. Gearset’s change monitoring has helped thousands of organisations track changes made directly in their orgs and bring them back into the development team’s natural rhythm.
With a recent release, we’ve extended this feature to make it possible to take changes that Gearset detected and move them directly to another org, such as downstream QA or development, or even push them through to your version control system.
Migrating detected changes
Change monitoring jobs in Gearset take sanapshots of orgs metadata on a daily basis and track the changes. Because these daily snapshots are saved in the app, they can be used as the source of a new comparison. By selecting another org, or a source control branch, as the target, detected changes can be rapidly promoted to other environments to keep them in sync.
Step 1: Click Deploy changes from the list of alerts for that monitoring job
Step 2: Choose the target that you want to deploy the detected changes to and start the comparison. The target can be either another Salesforce org or a branch in source control.
Step 3: When the comparison has finished, Gearset will automatically preselect the changes that were detected in the source org. You can then review what will be deployed before continuing with validating and deploying the changes in a couple of clicks.
Step 4: As with all deployments in Gearset, any changes that you deploy from a monitoring job will be audited and available for the whole team to see from the deployment history page. Changes deployed from a monitoring job will be tagged as Change monitor for easy identification.
What if the changes weren’t good?
We hope that Gearset’s monitoring only ever picks up good changes that people have made because the business needed them. However, we all know that user that has a few too many permissions and made a change that wasn’t so good. Gearset offers the ability to roll back changes that have been deteced for just that scenario. This means if somebody has made a quick change, bypassing the usual scrutiny, then you can easily undo it and make sure the changes goes through proper planning, implementation and review.
Try Gearset for yourself
We really hope you find this addition useful - the feature request came directly from our users. If you’re new to Gearset and want to see it in action for yourself, just start a free trial to get started!
If you’d like to learn about version control best practices that will help you create a streamlined Salesforce DevOps process, download our free whitepaper.