As businesses rely more heavily on Salesforce, teams developing on the platform are faced with higher demand. Many Salesforce teams are turning to DevOps practices to meet business requirements, helping to deliver work quickly, efficiently and safely.
As DevOps has become more established in the Salesforce ecosystem, if you haven’t yet started to implement DevOps practices, you risk being left behind. Read on for an overview of DevOps, and some guidance on how you can get started.
What is Salesforce DevOps?
‘DevOps’ is a set of practices designed to help teams build, test, and release software faster and more reliably. It stems from the need to combine the responsibilities of both software development teams (‘Dev’) and operations teams (‘Ops’).
For Salesforce, this means bringing together the people responsible for building applications (developers and admins) and the people responsible for releasing, monitoring and maintaining those applications (typically admins, team leads or release managers).
When the responsibility of releasing software is shared across the whole development team, there are fewer silos and the team can communicate and collaborate more effectively.
What’s the difference between DevOps and agile development?
DevOps aims to make release cycles faster, more secure and less error-prone. This is partly achieved by incorporating the philosophy of agile development: releasing changes incrementally and regularly adding improvements, rather than releasing once at the end of a big project. DevOps also relies heavily on automation to shorten the release cycle and feedback loops, by replacing fragile manual processes with repeatable, reliable ones.
The benefits of DevOps
DevOps is now established as the best way of creating and managing software on Salesforce and other platforms and software stacks. Although it’s an approach that has well-documented benefits, some teams still aren’t quite sure what DevOps is and why they should invest.
The whole purpose of DevOps is to increase the ability of teams to deliver new features and solve critical issues quickly and with confidence. By shifting left, you can resolve issues much earlier in the process, rather than discovering problems once in production where it costs much more in time and money to fix. And by looking right, you can react to production issues rapidly and proactively improve your org health.
So it’s no surprise that high-performing teams who use DevOps best practices score highly on the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics, achieving:
- A higher frequency of new releases to production
- Shorter lead times for making changes and developing new features
- Fewer bugs and fewer service disruptions due to poor quality code
- Faster restore times in the event of service outages
In fact, Google’s 2024 DORA report found that elite teams deploy 182 times more frequently than low-performing teams. High-performing teams also have a lead time from commit to deploy that’s 127 times faster, a change failure rate that’s 8 times lower, and recover from deployments 2,293 times faster.
And we’re seeing similar trends among teams developing on Salesforce. Our industry report shows that teams with the highest performance metrics all have a mature DevOps process in place. The biggest performance differentiator isn’t team size, experience level, or even which specific tools a team uses — it’s how consolidated their DevOps toolset is. Teams with the most streamlined setup are 5 times more likely to deploy in under an hour than teams juggling the most tools, and 5 times less likely to need a full day to get a deployment out the door.
The general benefits of DevOps apply across all software development, but Salesforce DevOps has its own advantages that are specific to the unique characteristics of the powerful Salesforce platform. These include being able to automate releases, version controlling Salesforce metadata and increasing collaboration by utilising native tools like Salesforce DX. Some DevOps platforms, like Gearset, allow you to harness the power of SFDX, without the need for the Salesforce CLI.
Teams adopting Salesforce DevOps practices with Gearset have a 98% deployment success rate, and can release up to 12x faster than when they deployed with change sets. In short, teams that have adopted DevOps practices dramatically outpace those that haven’t.
What does Salesforce DevOps involve?
Luckily, adopting DevOps for Salesforce development doesn’t necessarily mean you have to make lots of changes all at once. Taking just one step towards a more agile development process can reap rewards. You may even find your team is already doing some things that are part of DevOps!
A useful way to think about what’s involved is through the Salesforce DevOps lifecycle: a set of six stages that together represent a complete, continuous approach to delivery. The lifecycle is typically represented as an infinity loop — reflecting the fact that DevOps is iterative, with each cycle of delivery feeding back into the next.
Rather than treating phases as isolated tasks, the DevOps lifecycle unites them into a single, integrated framework that embodies a comprehensive DevOps strategy. Each stage is built to enhance the others, creating a collective impact that far exceeds the individual components. This is what you are ultimately aiming to achieve.
The six stages are:
Plan — define what needs to be built, gather requirements from end users, and design the right solution before anyone writes a line of code. Investing in and getting this stage right reduces costly rework downstream.
Build — make your changes, whether that’s in Flow Builder, VS Code, Agent Builder, or wherever the work happens. If the rest of the lifecycle is running well, this is where your team gets to spend most of its time.
Validate — build confidence in your changes before release. This is where automated testing, code review, and quality gating in your pipeline catch the majority of issues before they reach production.
Release — deploy changes to production quickly and reliably. This is the most impactful stage for most teams to address first, and where the time savings from DevOps are most immediately felt. With the right tools and process, teams can deploy reliably, adopt version control, then build an automated pipeline to achieve continuous delivery.
Operate — protect your org and your end users from downtime or disruption by backing up data and metadata, managing data storage, and keeping production stable.
Observe — proactively monitor org performance, catch errors before users report them, and feed those insights back into planning. The insights from observability feed into the planning stage, joining the loop of the DevOps lifecycle.
Most teams don’t start at stage one and work through in order. They typically begin where the pain is greatest — often the release stage — and expand their DevOps practice from there. The goal over time is a complete lifecycle, where every stage is covered and the team has a tight, continuous feedback loop from production back into planning.
Want to learn more about Salesforce DevOps?
DevOps Launchpad is a free training platform for anyone wanting to develop their knowledge and supercharge the skills needed for Salesforce DevOps. You’ll even get the chance to showcase your expertise by sharing your certifications and badges with your peers and colleagues. So, whether you’re completely new to DevOps, or you have years of experience, DevOps Launchpad can help you in all areas, from version control to backup. Level up today!
Where to start with Salesforce DevOps tools
Now you know what the six stages involve, the natural next question is: what tools support each one? Here’s a practical overview of the main categories of Salesforce DevOps tooling, mapped to the lifecycle, to help you successful adopt DevOps.
Plan
Org intelligence tooling helps you understand the current state of your org — surfacing metadata dependencies and technical debt so you can design changes that won’t cause problems downstream. Ticketing (ALM) tools like Jira or Azure DevOps keep requirements and tasks organized and visible across the team.
Build & Validate
Version control gives every team member a shared source of truth and prevents changes from overwriting each other. Sandbox seeding populates test environments with realistic, masked production data so testing reflects real-world conditions. Automated code reviews flag security vulnerabilities and quality issues as code is written, not after it’s shipped. Test automation — covering both unit tests and UI tests — validates that everything works as intended before it goes anywhere near production.
Release
Deployment tooling eliminates manual change tracking and simplifies the release process. CI/CD pipelines automate the promotion of changes through your environments, with quality gates built in so nothing progresses unless it passes.
Operate
Backup protects your data and metadata with automated, regular snapshots and a tested restore process. Archiving removes obsolete data to keep your org lean, reduce storage costs, and maintain data quality.
Observe
Observability tooling proactively monitors your production org for Flow and Apex errors, org limit warnings, and runtime issues — before users report them. Auditing maintains a record of who changed what and when, for compliance purposes. Reporting lets you track DevOps performance over time using metrics like DORA, so you can quantify the business impact of your investment.
No two teams will need exactly the same toolset — the right combination depends on your team’s size, technical makeup, and where you are in your DevOps journey.
Gearset removes the complexity of DevOps, with the flexibility to adopt the DevOps lifecycle in a way that suits your team.
Launch your DevOps lifecycle journey for Salesforce
Gearset offers a full end-to-end platform designed to support every phase of the Salesforce DevOps lifecycle. Speak to one of our DevOps experts about your existing processes or start a 30-day free trial and discover how Gearset helps you implement modern best practices and achieve full lifecycle integration, resulting in substantial gains in your Salesforce delivery performance.
