The State of Salesforce DevOps 2022 is hot off the press! Jam-packed with the latest data, informative charts and expert analysis, this report will help you and your Salesforce team make a success of DevOps this year. Thanks to the 1,062 Salesforce professionals from around the world who took our survey and made this report possible, you can delve into our findings and discover what’s driving the entire Salesforce ecosystem to adopt DevOps.
The rapid rise of Salesforce DevOps
Not that long ago, DevOps was an unfamiliar concept to many Salesforce professionals. Admins routinely made changes directly in production, while developers tolerated using change sets or the Ant migration tool for deployments of code and configuration. But that way of working turned out to be unsustainable. For many companies, production orgs became an unmanageable mess, and releases became increasingly painful.
All the while, Salesforce has been getting more and more sophisticated. Today’s platform is so much more than a CRM, used for a dizzying variety of business processes and innovations. And this means ever-increasing demand on Salesforce teams to deliver large and more advanced projects.
The pressing need to meet this workload has driven teams to look for better approaches to release management. Gearset was created in 2015 to bring DevOps best practices to Salesforce and has been embraced by thousands of admins, developers, release managers, architects and consultants. There has also been an influx of developers to the Salesforce ecosystem from other platforms where DevOps is the norm.
These trends, in combination, have triggered skyrocketing adoption of DevOps in the Salesforce ecosystem over the last few years.
DevOps is the new normal for Salesforce
Where has the Salesforce ecosystem reached at the outset of 2022? For the first time ever, the majority of Salesforce teams have begun using the tools for a source-driven, automated release pipeline: 66% use source control and 51% use CI/CD. What’s more, a further 23% plan to adopt source control and an incredible 31% hope to have CI/CD in place by the end of this year. Only a remnant of teams still have no plans for DevOps adoption.
How many Salesforce teams have adopted DevOps tools?
Salesforce teams see the benefits of DevOps
There are classic pain points that prompt Salesforce teams to investigate DevOps: sluggish deployments, development work getting lost or overwritten, orgs that are wildly out of sync, no audit trails detailing changes, no resilience when things go wrong, and an inability to keep up with demand from the business.
Salesforce teams recognize that DevOps will resolve these issues and produce other benefits. When asked about the benefits of DevOps, almost all survey respondents expect to see results across the board. This understanding is what drives DevOps adoption.
Which benefits do teams expect from DevOps?
Key obstacles on the path to DevOps maturity
Many Salesforce teams are in the relatively early stages of their DevOps journey and the State of Salesforce DevOps 2022 report highlights the obstacles they face.
The adoption of DevOps tools is the clearest indicator that teams have begun their DevOps journey. Picking up source control, then introducing automation with CI/CD, and adding in other essentials for release quality and security are necessary steps. But tools alone don’t amount to DevOps maturity. How those tools are used matters just as much, which means culture and leadership are vitally important for DevOps success. And as teams mature into DevOps, some encounter growing pains.
For example, while 66% of teams are using source control, a smaller percentage (39%) are using it as the source of truth for most or all of their metadata. The remainder are in the process of getting used to Git. They either use their Git repo as the source of truth for a small subset of metadata types (12%) or just as a way to back up some metadata (15%). Once these teams are familiar with Git, they should take the next step and place source control at the heart of their release pipeline.
People-related challenges are often more significant than difficulties with tooling. Teams struggling to adopt DevOps most frequently blame a lack of collaboration, and this is closely linked to a problem with inconsistent ways of working. Survey respondents admit to deploying outside their defined release process very often, and real progress won’t be possible until that process is well defined, understood, valued and followed.
How often are changes deployed outside the release pipeline?
DevOps is boosting performance across the ecosystem
As teams overcome these obstacles and mature into DevOps, their performance is steadily improving. The report analyzes performance in terms of seven key metrics:
- Deployment time
- Release frequency
- Lead time
- Cycle time
- Change failure rate
- Time to recover after releasing a bug or error
- Time to restore from data or metadata loss
Comparing the results with last year’s data, it’s clear that Salesforce teams are deploying faster, releasing more frequently and more safely.
But few teams have made it to an elite level of performance - releasing daily, keeping change failure rates low and being able to restore from data or metadata loss within a few days. Just 10% release at least once a day. Less than a quarter keep bugs and errors out of most releases. And less than half have demonstrated that they can restore within days.
How frequently do Salesforce teams release to production?
Want more insights?
For the complete picture, download your copy of The State of Salesforce DevOps 2022 today! Benchmark your own team’s performance against the rest of the ecosystem and get expert analysis of the latest data, helping you to work out the next steps towards DevOps maturity and getting the best out of Salesforce.