Report: The State of Salesforce DevOps 2023

Report: The State of Salesforce DevOps 2023

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The State of Salesforce DevOps 2023 is now live and ready to download! Loaded with the latest data, graphs and expert analysis, this year’s report will help you and your Salesforce team reach DevOps success by giving you the key insights you need to navigate the latest ecosystem trends. Thanks to 1,254 Salesforce professionals from across the world, you can find out what’s driving success for a whole host of teams who are already accelerating through their DevOps journey.

The demand on Salesforce teams is growing

After the sharp uptake of DevOps over the past few years, it’s unsurprising that more and more teams are seeing the benefits of reliable deployments and automated releases.

Salesforce continues to adapt to exactly what teams need and is becoming 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.

This year almost all respondents (97%) say that their organization’s use of Salesforce has evolved. Whether that’s down to them using more apps and making use of custom integrations or supporting an influx of end users, it’s clear that Salesforce is becoming increasingly complex.

As the complexity of Salesforce grows, so does the demand on the teams developing on the platform. A huge 90% of respondents said that their workload has increased — and because of this, teams are spending an average of 9 hours outside of contracted work hours on releasing each month.

The benefits of adopting DevOps

There are always teething problems when adopting new tools and concepts — and DevOps is no exception. Some teams get bogged down by unreliable and sluggish deployments and lack the confidence to carry on. However, once teams recognize the benefits and take the first steps of adopting DevOps, they are sure to see positive results throughout their whole workflow.

Over half (54%) of respondents said that increased productivity was the main benefit they saw after implementing DevOps. Improved frequency and quality of releases were also stated as one of the top perks of DevOps.

83% are currently using, or planning to use, CI/CD this year

DevOps is boosting performance across the ecosystem

This year we benchmarked teams against six performance-based metrics:

  1. Deployment time
  2. Release frequency
  3. Lead time
  4. Change failure rate
  5. Time to recover (after releasing a bug or error)
  6. Time to restore (from data or metadata loss)

High scores on these metrics mean that teams are able to deliver value faster and respond quickly to changing business needs. These results are a stark improvement on last year and show that teams continue to take DevOps seriously, no matter where they are in their adoption journey.

The majority of Salesforce teams see ROI on DevOps.
  • 72% of respondents are deploying within 4 hours
  • 13% of companies are releasing every day, some multiple times daily
  • 18% are able to release a newly built feature to production in less than a day
  • 46% can fix a bug or error in a day or less

This year we’ve identified a small group of ‘elite’ DevOps performers: teams that have adopted DevOps and rate their collaboration as ‘excellent’. Just 9% of respondents fall into this category, and their DevOps performance far surpasses everyone else’s. They’re 61% more likely than average to deploy in under an hour.

What are the biggest obstacles?

With any kind of new process adoption there will inevitably be teething problems — and without continuously improving across all areas of DevOps, it’s easy to come up against some tricky obstacles. The lack of collaboration across teams, as well as a lack of training in DevOps processes, were named as two of the biggest blockers.

Digging deeper into this, we found that teams who are training regularly are outperforming those who aren’t and are 26% more likely to backup their data. Allowing teams the time to train properly will then foster the collaborative culture that DevOps is underpinned on. Most respondents who train once a month also say that DevOps aligns with the wider company culture (68%), compared to a minority of those who receive no training at all (42%).

83% are currently using, or planning to use, CI/CD this year

Want to find out more?

The State of Salesforce DevOps 2023 report not only gives an in-depth look into the current adoption rates and performance metrics, but it allows you to benchmark your own team’s performance against others in the ecosystem. Read the expert analysis of the latest data now, helping you to work out the next steps towards DevOps maturity and getting the best out of Salesforce. Don’t miss out, you can download the report for free here.

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