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Top 10 business benefits of Salesforce DevOps

Holly White on September 23rd 2022

Salesforce DevOps is increasingly being seen as a smart business investment. By adopting the tools needed to increase the speed, frequency and quality of their releases, teams are able to deliver more value to the business. But there are many reasons why companies that rely on the Salesforce platform seek out powerful DevOps tools and adopt agile DevOps practices.

The benefits of Salesforce DevOps are enterprise-wide, spanning many technical and operational areas. This article draws on key findings of The State of Salesforce DevOps 2022 industry report to give you a list of the top ten benefits to businesses.

Salesforce DevOps—what is it, and why's everyone talking about it?

Rachel Maton on September 13th 2022

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, because DevOps helps them deliver work quickly, efficiently and safely.

DevOps is growing in popularity in the Salesforce ecosystem, but for many teams it's still a new concept. Read on for a quick overview of DevOps, and some guidance on how you can get started.

The state of Salesforce backup in 2022

Holly White on August 24th 2022

As your business depends on Salesforce to hold business data and streamline operations, protecting your data and metadata is more important than ever. How would your business cope if you suffered significant metadata corruption or an integration scrambled a load of production data? How long would it take you and your team to get up and running again? Gearset’s State of Salesforce DevOps 2022 report found that too few companies are fully protected with a backup solution—although teams are waking up to the vulnerability of their data and metadata.

DevSecOps: How Salesforce DevOps embraces security

David Runciman on August 24th 2022

More and more Salesforce teams are adopting DevOps and reaping the rewards. Salesforce developers and admins are increasingly familiar with DevOps concepts. But what about DevSecOps—a term that’s been doing the rounds for a little while? What does it mean for your Salesforce team?

DevSecOps is about breaking down silos between development, security and operations—with security consciously placed at the center. Essentially, DevSecOps is DevOps done well; security should be baked in at the beginning, not left as an afterthought.

Why financial firms bank on Salesforce DevOps

Nia Owen on August 11th 2022

Financial firms are often at the forefront of integrating business operations via innovative solutions built on top of the Salesforce platform. At the same time, these companies are required to operate in highly regulated environments with no margin for error.

We've analyzed the data from our State of Salesforce DevOps 2022 survey to gather more insights into how the financial sector is able to deliver Salesforce-driven innovation at speed. This post assesses the development and release processes of financial firms to see how they stack up against performances by companies in other industries.

5 ways for Salesforce teams to avoid merge conflicts

Matt Dickens on July 4th 2022

For teams using version control, merge conflicts are just a fact of life. They can never be entirely avoided when you have groups of developers working on a number of shared projects. It’s not that adopting version control creates a new problem. Merge conflicts just highlight where work would have been overwritten when deploying between orgs.

Live summit: How to master Salesforce DevOps

Liz Priestley on June 14th 2022

We’re gearing up for our next live summit on June 22nd! With just over a week to go, How to master Salesforce DevOps will help you take on the world of Salesforce DevOps, and transform your entire business by enabling teams to deliver value faster. Sit back and relax as we take you through the challenges teams are facing in the current ecosystem. If you haven’t yet booked your place, you can sign up here:

The secret to Salesforce success: DevOps culture

David Runciman on June 13th 2022

In recent years, most DevOps reports have highlighted the importance of culture for achieving elite-level performance. Gearset’s report, The State of Salesforce DevOps 2022, is no exception. Time and again, the data shows that it’s a mistake to expect DevOps success without changes in attitudes, values, and ways of working. People make DevOps work: they need the right tools, but it’s how they use them that makes the difference.

Our full report contains the latest figures for DevOps adoption and performance in the Salesforce ecosystem, along with our analysis. In this post, we’ll unpack the key theme of culture in a little more detail.

How to keep your Salesforce environments in sync

David Runciman on June 6th 2022

Struggling with Salesforce orgs that are out of sync? You’re not alone - it’s a problem that troubles many Salesforce teams. In this post we’ll take a good look at how to keep your orgs in sync: why it matters, the challenges, and the best solutions.

Why 43% of enterprises fail to see Salesforce’s true value

David Runciman on May 31st 2022

Salesforce is the world’s #1 CRM, with more than 150,000 customers globally. But thousands of those customers aren’t seeing the true value of Salesforce. Why? Because the promise of Salesforce is that it can easily be customized to meet exact business requirements, but Salesforce developers and admins simply can’t deliver those customizations quickly enough.

Report: The State of Salesforce DevOps 2022

David Runciman on April 11th 2022

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.

Troubleshooting a Salesforce error for Tableau CRM deployments with WaveRecipe

Sam Eastwood on March 2nd 2022

Have you ever tried deploying Tableau CRM changes, specifically WaveRecipe metadata, and hit this error: A Recipe must specify a Dataflow? If so, you're in the right place. In this post, I'll explain what causes that particular Salesforce error message, and how you can resolve it.

Keep track of your Salesforce orgs' metadata with automated change monitoring

Holly White on February 28th 2022

Imagine being confident that everything is in order across your production org, and no changes can be made without your knowing about it. You and your team spend a long time building and customizing your Salesforce metadata so ideally you want to be the first to know when there's a change that you weren't expecting. This is where Gearset's unique change monitoring tool comes in very handy.

How to restore data corrupted by a Salesforce integration

Holly White on February 11th 2022

Data integrations are powerful tools that can speed up very time-consuming processes and allow you to migrate or sync your data between multiple environments. But if you're familiar with the benefits of running Salesforce integrations, you might also be familiar with their flaws. Even the smallest issue or entry error can run amok with your data sets and corrupt thousands of records.

5 ways to improve your DevOps strategy

Rachel Maton on January 7th 2022

Teams are increasingly prioritizing DevOps practices as they build plans for Salesforce. With a DevOps-focused strategy, teams can ship improvements faster and incorporate stakeholder feedback more easily. If you want to make a success of Salesforce, there are 5 fundamental areas that you and your team should be aware of. Whatever stage you’re at, this post should give you some inspiration for planning your next steps.

Guarantee ROI with Salesforce DevOps automation

David Runciman on December 16th 2021

Most teams adopting Gearset first notice the dramatic reduction in deployment times compared to using change sets. These time-savings translate into real cost-savings. The bottom line of your IT budget is healthier because devs and admins are freed up to work on building features that add value, rather than toiling away unnecessarily on manual, error-prone deployments. But savings on deployment times are just the beginning of a substantial return on investment in DevOps tooling.

Smarter Salesforce comparisons that hide reordered XML

David Runciman on November 26th 2021

When is a change not a change? Don't worry - that's not the beginning of a bad joke. But it's a riddle that Salesforce devs and admins sometimes find themselves puzzling out. Confusingly, a comparison of two orgs can throw up apparent differences that turn out to be nothing more than reordered XML. Gearset's intelligent comparison engine recognizes and hides these immaterial differences for you, so you can focus on the actual changes you want to deploy.

Gearset Summit: The key drivers of Salesforce DevOps success

Ellis Toms on October 29th 2021

On October 14th, hundreds of Salesforce professionals from around the globe gathered together for another Gearset DevOps Summit. The key drivers of DevOps success was a fantastic half-day event that saw presentations from a series of industry experts and plenty of lively discussion between attendees.

If you missed out on the action, don't worry! All of the talks were recorded so you can catch up on the highlights.

Guarantee access to your Salesforce data at all times

David Runciman on September 2nd 2021

Data is the lifeblood of your Salesforce org. While Salesforce metadata is valuable and powerful because it describes the shape and behavior of your org, all of the customizations your team makes are ultimately intended to improve data handling processes. That being the case, it's essential that you have data and metadata backups so you can keep access to your data at all times - even during a Salesforce outage.

The safe way to declutter your org and make destructive changes

Mareya Saba on August 17th 2021

Salesforce makes it easy for you to add fields, objects and customizations. Salesforce teams don't always anticipate the problem of redundant metadata, which can quickly clutter up your org as processes evolve and plans change. Obsolete features in your org are a problem, and the solution must be carefully chosen. In this post we'll explore the reasons for deleting metadata, and how to do it safely.

Don't use Data Export for Salesforce backups and disaster recovery

David Runciman on August 12th 2021

Despite Salesforce's clear recommendation to invest in a third-party backup solution, many businesses still use Data Export to create backups of their Salesforce data. Gearset's State of Salesforce DevOps 2021 report reveals that while 58% of businesses have a backup solution, 31% back up their orgs using Data Export or a similar tool. But Data Export falls short in several ways as a tool for any backup and restore operation, let alone for disaster recovery.

5 ways to improve collaboration across Salesforce teams

Simon Breslaw on July 2nd 2021

Collaboration in Salesforce teams can be difficult. But making the transition from in-org development to a source-driven DevOps process empowers everyone with a quick and reliable way to move new work down the release pipeline. A complete Salesforce DevOps solution like Gearset builds on the fundamentals of the modern DevOps process to make team collaboration even easier and more efficient. This post highlights five additional ways administrators and developers can stay aligned and up to date with their team's latest changes and development work.

How does Gearset compare with change sets?

David Runciman on July 1st 2021

Many admins and developers still manage Salesforce deployments using change sets, the platform-native tooling with no upfront costs. But deploying with change sets is a painful process that unnecessarily wastes these Salesforce professionals' time and talent.

What's the real ROI of Salesforce DevOps?

Simon Breslaw on June 14th 2021

Measuring a return on investment in Salesforce DevOps is a difficult undertaking, but a task that's well worth the effort. An ROI evaluation is sometimes required by teams who need to convince their senior management of the financial benefits of implementing a new process, especially when purchasing new DevOps tools. There are also good business arguments for continually measuring your performance and assessing the value added by your Salesforce team.

The healthcare sector needs DevOps to cure sluggish Salesforce releases

David Runciman on June 4th 2021

Organizations in the healthcare and pharma sector lag slightly behind average performances for Salesforce development and release management, across a number of key metrics. Gearset's State of Salesforce DevOps survey revealed that a lower prioritization of Salesforce DevOps in the sector correlates with slower releases and higher change failure rates. Teams of Salesforce professionals in healthcare need to adopt DevOps if they are to keep pace with rising demand for new customizations, continue to enhance resilience, and ensure compliance with stringent regulations.

Live summit: Explore Salesforce DevOps with industry experts

Ellis Toms on June 2nd 2021

We're really looking forward to the next Gearset DevOps Summit! How to Scale your Salesforce DevOps to maximize ROI is now just over a week away on June 10th. We'll get to hear thought leaders and industry experts from across the Salesforce ecosystem speak on a range of topics, as well as putting all of our questions to them. We'll also find out who wins the prize draw on the day! If you haven't yet booked your place, you can sign up here:

Gearset DevOps Summit: Scale your Salesforce DevOps to maximize ROI

Ellis Toms on May 20th 2021

After the enormous success of our first DevOps Summit in March, we've got another fantastic event lined up for you. Join Ben McCarthy of Salesforce Ben at our next live summit on June 10th, when industry speakers from across the community will explore how you can get the most out of Salesforce.

We'll dive deep into the ROI of Salesforce DevOps, discuss the secrets of high-performing Salesforce teams, and unveil the latest and greatest Gearset product updates, with an exclusive preview on the day. Save your place now to access all the sessions and recordings, take part in the Q&A, and enter our amazing prize draw:

Salesforce DevOps in the tech sector

David Runciman on April 30th 2021

Exploring the data from our State of Salesforce DevOps 2021 survey, we've discovered how DevOps adoption, performances and levels of maturity compare across Salesforce teams in different industries. We're looking forward to sharing these extra insights with you, starting with this post on the tech sector.

A guide to building a Center of Excellence for Salesforce DevOps

Vernon Keenan on April 29th 2021

This guest post is contributed by Vernon Keenan, Senior Industry Analyst at SalesforceDevops.net.

Salesforce DevOps solutions like Gearset deliver proven, measurable success for Salesforce teams around the world. The demand for solutions has picked up worldwide, and the IT industry now sees Salesforce DevOps competency as a concern that requires management and focus. To see evidence of widespread DevOps adoption across the ecosystem for yourself, be sure to check out Gearset's State of Salesforce DevOps 2021 report.

The latest on Salesforce's DevOps Center from the Gearset Summit

Simon Breslaw on April 21st 2021

In the second half of 2020, Salesforce began releasing information about its upcoming new ALM solution: DevOps Center. This change and release management tool is designed to democratize DevOps and improve the declarative developer experience. It offers admins and declarative developers a single UI interface to manage modern Git-based workflows alongside programmatic developers.

When DevOps Center was first announced, we gleaned what information we could find, speaking and writing about it towards the end of last year. At our recent Gearset Summit, Karen Fidelak, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce, gave a fantastic session on DevOps Center which included more information. Here are the key updates.

Salesforce DevOps approaches maturity

Simon Breslaw on April 16th 2021

Across the Salesforce ecosystem, teams are adopting DevOps tools and practices. Our recent survey report, The State of Salesforce DevOps 2021, shines a light on what's driving companies to make the transition to modern application lifecycle management (ALM).

This article explores the current DevOps adoption trends highlighted by the report, sets out key challenges faced by Salesforce teams, and discusses a few of the many reasons why DevOps is fast becoming the standard way of managing development pipelines on the platform.

Get the survey report: The State of Salesforce DevOps 2021

David Runciman on April 1st 2021

How widespread is DevOps among Salesforce teams right now? What's driving DevOps adoption? How does my team's performance in release management compare to others in the ecosystem? What's the future of Salesforce DevOps?

Find out the answers to all of these questions, and more, in the full survey report: The State of Salesforce DevOps 2021.

The hidden cost of change sets

David Runciman on March 12th 2021

Does your company still use change sets for Salesforce deployments? The cost of third-party deployment tools can hold companies back from moving on. After all, using change sets is free. Right?

It's true that there's no upfront fee for change sets. But if you're watching the bottom line of your budget, let me show you why carrying on with change sets actually comes at a substantial cost.

Don't miss the industry summit on DevOps for Salesforce

Ellis Toms on March 11th 2021

We're incredibly excited because The Future of Salesforce DevOps is now upon us! In just two weeks' time, we'll be hosting the live industry summit on March 25th. This is your chance to hear inspiring talks from a star-studded lineup of community leaders and to take part in live Q&As with DevOps experts. If you haven't already, be sure to register for the event to find out what the future holds for DevOps on the Salesforce platform.

The Future of Salesforce DevOps: a brand new live event

Ellis Toms on February 25th 2021

Save the date! On March 25th we'll be hosting a brand new and exciting live event: The Future of Salesforce DevOps. Join us for the latest insights and expertise - you'll get to hear talks from an awesome lineup of Salesforce leaders, and we'll explore the key findings from our State of Salesforce DevOps 2021 survey. All attendees will also be in the running for a prize that's not to be missed!

What's the state of Salesforce DevOps in 2021?

David Runciman on January 21st 2021

The Salesforce ecosystem is embracing DevOps like never before. Over the last six years, more and more teams have been adopting DevOps tools and processes. And now that Salesforce itself promotes DevOps, that trend is set to accelerate. But what's the state of Salesforce DevOps right now? We want to know - and you can help us by taking part in our survey! As an extra incentive (as if you needed one 😉 ), you can enter our prize draw for a MacBook!

Dreamforce 2020 highlight: How to unlock value from Salesforce

David Runciman on December 17th 2020

Patrick Kernan's talk, IT's 5–Step Playbook to Unlock Value from Salesforce, is one of the many Dreamforce talks we've enjoyed this year. Patrick has been at Salesforce for five years, helping large enterprises maximize the value they get out of Salesforce.

DevOps Launchpad: A new platform for mastering Salesforce DevOps 🚀

Simon Breslaw on December 14th 2020

We recently built DevOps Launchpad to help Salesforce professionals looking to level up their skill set and develop their knowledge of Salesforce DevOps. The new training platform offers everyone in the community an enjoyable way of learning key DevOps concepts and implementation strategies from in-depth courses written by experienced experts.

Whether you're new to DevOps or looking to broaden your understanding of current best practice, our DevOps Launchpad gives you the chance to complete industry-relevant courses, test your knowledge and earn certificates.

Dreamforce to You: Salesforce's DevOps Center

David Runciman on December 7th 2020

Join Gearset's co-founders, Kevin Boyle and Matt Dickens, this coming Thursday, December 10th at 10am PT for an exclusive take on Salesforce's DevOps Center.

CI/CD for Salesforce that just works out of the box

Simon Breslaw on November 4th 2020

At the heart of DevOps, CI/CD has proven a real game-changer for the Salesforce ecosystem by allowing for more reliable development and release cycles as you build, test, and ship code faster.

When setting up a CI/CD pipeline for Salesforce, teams make use of a variety of DevOps lifecycle tools. If you just choose a toolchain based on your existing solutions, integrations or familiarity with a given tool, you risk missing out on evaluating better alternatives. Your choice of DevOps solution can help you maximize the return on your Salesforce investment while also empowering all of your team. This post covers key aspects to consider when you're planning to automate your Salesforce pipeline.

How to create and deploy a scheduled flow

Michael Halliwell on November 3rd 2020

Need help creating and deploying a scheduled flow? Here's a step-by-step guide, written by one of Gearset's Community Advisors - the wonderful Michael Halliwell. This article assumes you already have base knowledge around the logic and data elements of flows.

How Gearset can help ISVs with first-generation packages

Eric Kintzer on August 27th 2020

This how-to guide for ISVs is contributed by the awesome Eric Kintzer, Salesforce Architect at Helix, and Gearset Community Advisor.

If you're an ISV with a first-generation managed package, you can use Gearset to improve your DevOps flow. This is true whether or not you use version control. In this post, I'll describe what the developer workflow usually looks like without Gearset, and then explain how to set up a better workflow with Gearset.

DevOps and the transition from Profiles to Permission Sets

Eric Kintzer on August 19th 2020

Today's post - a deep dive into the world of Salesforce profiles and permission sets - is written by the awesome Eric Kintzer, Salesforce Architect at Helix, and Gearset Community Advisor.

Profiles, permission sets, and permission set groups are among the primary ways that Salesforce manages user access to your application's functionality. Profile, PermissionSet and PermissionSetGroup are all metadata types that can be deployed between orgs and/or source control with a DevOps tool such as Gearset. The users assigned to these profile or permission set objects are data records and generally established in the org by a system administrator or user with delegated user administration privileges.

For several years, Salesforce has signalled that orgs should move away from profiles and towards permission sets. This article looks into some of the implications of making that transition.

Improve your disaster recovery planning with the complete backup solution for Salesforce

David Runciman on August 11th 2020

The loss or corruption of your Salesforce data can cause a major disruption to your business, or worse. Every such incident calls for a backup solution that lets you restore both data and metadata quickly and reliably; most will also call for the implementation of an incident response plan, a disaster recovery plan, or both.

Previously, we've looked at the best way to approach restoring your org after data loss, and we've explored what Salesforce teams need from an incident response plan. In this post, we'll turn to disaster recovery planning.

Backups for Salesforce: download the complete guide now!

Ellie Dyer-Brown on July 17th 2020

With the upcoming retirement of Salesforce's Data Recovery service on July 31, lots of Salesforce teams will have questions about the best way to build a backup strategy. That's why we've created a handy guide to backing up your Salesforce org and restoring lost data. Our ebook, free to download now, tackles all of the topics you need to know, with helpful tips and advice from our DevOps experts.

Automate the creation of Salesforce scratch orgs within a continuous integration (CI) workflow

Jonathan Plumridge on July 14th 2020

Modern SFDX workflows often rely heavily on the use of scratch orgs, which are a great tool for testing changes in a safe environment. Gearset supports both manual creation of scratch orgs, as well as automatic creation during continuous integration (CI) jobs, which is what we'll focus on in this post.

What Salesforce teams need from an incident response plan

David Runciman on July 3rd 2020

In the morning, one of your sales team tells you she can't find the records on her deals. As you start to investigate, similar reports trickle in from others across the company. By lunchtime it's clear that your org has seen significant data loss, and the metadata shaping your org has also been affected. Not only are records missing, the fields that hold those records aren't there either. What would you do next?

A scenario like this is a real risk for Salesforce orgs, and your company needs to have a response prepared. Having a backup solution in place with backups of both data and metadata is absolutely essential. It's also well worth creating or reviewing your own incident response plan. This post sets out the things that plan should contain for your Salesforce team.

Data protection for Salesforce made easy

Simon Breslaw on June 30th 2020

Company data stored in Salesforce orgs must be protected - whether you're dealing with sales records, sensitive business information or customers' credit card and social security numbers. In our recent series of blog posts on data backups for Salesforce, we explained some of the many technical reasons why backing up Salesforce data and putting a robust data recovery process in place is both essential and an important DevOps tool for Salesforce teams. But particularly when it comes to customers' personal data, a backup solution is not only necessary as a technical precaution for many companies, but effectively a requirement under data protection regulations too.

In this post, we set out some implications of the GDPR and CCPA for your Salesforce backups, and give you a brief outline of how a backup tool like Gearset can make it easier for you to comply with data protection requirements.

How to restore Salesforce data from backups

David Runciman on June 15th 2020

How would you go about restoring your org after a data loss incident? You don't have any viable options without backups of your data and metadata, so the first thing is to start backing up your org. But even once you have backups in place, you still need to think about your restore process ahead of any data incident.

Backing up your Salesforce org in a DevOps world

Simon Breslaw on June 5th 2020

For a long time now, Salesforce has actively encouraged teams to have third-party backup solutions in place. We've explored some of the many reasons for this in our recent series of blog posts: why you need backup for Salesforce, why you need backups of both your metadata and data, and what data you need to back up. But when it comes to choosing the right backup tool for your team, there are other things also worth considering. This post sets out the benefits of going for a seamless and automated solution that integrates your backup and restore processes into your existing DevOps workflow and tooling.

Backing up your Salesforce data? You need metadata backups too!

David Runciman on May 21st 2020

In a previous post, we looked at the most common causes of data loss on the Salesforce platform. It's clear that anyone who wants to be prepared for the real risk of data loss must have backups of their Salesforce data. But what about metadata? Your org holds all sorts of records that are obviously business-critical. Is your metadata really as important?

Gearset is on G2! Here's how we're going to use it

David Runciman on April 7th 2020

At Gearset, we pride ourselves on being close to our users, and we're lucky to find ourselves in a community of great people! You help us to spread the word about Gearset, and you give us awesome feedback on ways we can support the processes you want to implement. So, from the whole team: thank you!

Why you need a backup solution for Salesforce

David Runciman on March 17th 2020

Salesforce orgs need backup. And yet, for various reasons, many people assume their Salesforce data is safe. Unfortunately, none of those reasons bear any scrutiny. Here's why you need to think about backup.

Helping Salesforce developers create readable and maintainable Apex code

Gwilym Kuiper on March 2nd 2020

Good code quality is hard to define and even more difficult to measure. At the same time, a clean code culture - or rather the lack of one - can have significant cost and maintenance implications. At Gearset, we've gone a very long way towards helping teams integrate automated code quality checks into their development pipelines. At the heart of this effort is PMD, an awesome code analysis tool used in Gearset's static code analysis. Our PMD-based code analyzer checks your codebase for issues in areas such as style, design, security, performance and best practice.

Gearset, and our users, have benefitted hugely from PMD for Apex - we run static code analysis a few hundred thousand times a month, which catches an average of 60 violations per deployment. This wouldn't be possible without the work of the PMD maintainers. So when Robert Sösemann, one of the maintainers of the open source PMD Source Code Analyzer Project, reached out to the Salesforce community for help and expertise, we were naturally more than happy to give something back to this fantastic project.

Troubleshooting Salesforce deployments with Shield Platform Encryption settings

Eric Kintzer on January 27th 2020

Today’s troubleshooting guide is written by the awesome Eric Kintzer, Salesforce Architect at Helix, and Gearset Community Advisor.

To protect your Salesforce data with an added layer of security, you may have opted for Shield Platform Encryption; the next step up from Salesforce’s Classic Encryption. This option allows you to encrypt a much wider subset of standard and custom fields, as well as person accounts, cases, search, approval processes, and other key Salesforce features.

However, orgs that adopt Shield Platform Encryption will face certain subtleties when deploying encryption settings. This article exposes some of these common quirks and how to work around them.

Package-based workflows for devs and admins

Tom Smith on December 2nd 2019

Packages are designed to take the complexity (or 'dependency hell') out of developing, updating and releasing new software features. Salesforce's unlocked packages, also referred to as second-generation packaging (2GP), make it possible for teams to develop and deploy self-contained units of code. As part of Salesforce DX, unlocked packages support a modern, modular and iterative development process on the platform.

At Gearset, we help teams who use unlocked packages get the most out of streamlined workflows that work for both devs and admins. Recently, we've added some useful alerts to our metadata deployment and continuous integration processes. Whenever a user attempts to deploy changes to components within an unlocked package, we make sure they're made aware of what they're doing. We might not be able to prevent folks from altering packages directly in production (however much we'd like to sometimes 😉), but at least we can alert you when they do. That way, you can prevent changes made in your production org from being overwritten when the packages get updated later on.

Good Salesforce data practices

Tom Smith on May 20th 2019

The process of deploying data between Salesforce orgs can be a difficult and fraught affair. There’s so much to consider and remember, especially when deploying critical data to production. Complex data relationships with all manner of references between record types mean that you have to consider dependencies, relationship handling and field mapping before deploying records to your target. All of this can be a time-consuming and error-prone process to say the least.

How to restore your Profiles and PermissionSets after Salesforce outage

Kevin Boyle on May 18th 2019

On the 17th May 2019, an incident occurred where a significant portion of Salesforce customers had their orgs modified unexpectedly, and their permission model corrupted. The permissions and profiles of those affected orgs were all granted the Modify All Data permission. The impact of that change was that all users on the org could access and modify all data in the org, regardless of their profile level. This is an ongoing incident, so refer to https://trust.salesforce.com for the latest updates and the root cause analysis.

In this blog post, I’ll walk through how users of Gearset Enterprise can get their profiles and permission sets back to the state they were in before the incident occurred.

Our new whitepaper - Adopting Salesforce DX: get your team ready for the future of DevOps

Matt Dickens on November 27th 2018

At Dreamforce in late 2016, we were asked a lot of questions about what we thought of Salesforce DX, following its public announcement. It feels like a lifetime ago, but way back then, we put together a post documenting our thoughts on SFDX - what it was, who it was for, and what it means for the future of ALM on the platform. We also talked about what it means for third-parties like Gearset building DevOps tools for Salesforce.

Writing an open source Apex syntax highlighter for the Monaco editor

Oli Lane on September 3rd 2018

Microsoft's VSCode has come along leaps and bounds in the last couple of years, both in functionality and popularity. One of my favourite things about it is that it's open source, which means that not only can you check out the source code for yourself, you can contribute, too!

At its core, VSCode is powered by the Monaco editor, which handles all of the code editing functionality. Since it's all built on top of browser technology, it's actually possible to use the Monaco editor by itself inside a browser - and in fact, that's exactly what we do to render most of our code and XML diffs within Gearset.

Monaco handles things like diff rendering, quick navigation and syntax highlighting for you, but when it came to displaying Apex diffs, there was no Apex syntax highlighter available. Since Java and Apex are syntactically pretty similar, we got away with using the inbuilt Java syntax highlighting for a little while, but we wanted to both improve our product and give back to the open source community that helps build this fantastic editor. So, I decided to take a stab at writing an Apex syntax highlighter and contributing it back to the project.

Creating Salesforce CLI plugins for extra SFDX goodness

Kevin Boyle on June 29th 2018

At Gearset we’ve stayed on the cutting edge of DevOps on the Salesforce platform by taking advantage of the new APIs that Salesforce gives us in each release. With the release of Summer ‘18 I had a go at writing a plugin for the Salesforce CLI (sfdx) to expose the new Metadata Coverage report in the terminal.

Get prepared for Salesforce DX with our guide to version control for Salesforce

Jason Mann on June 14th 2018

Source-driven development is at the heart of modern Salesforce release management. Shifting the source of truth from the org to version control is the foundation on which DX is built, vital for letting developers build collaboratively and deliver continuously.

If you or your team are looking to harness the full power of Salesforce DX, make sure you have your version control strategy in place before you get started.

We can help you do just that with our practical guide to implementing git-based release management. In our whitepaper we examine how version control works, the benefits of version control over in-org development, and introduce a best-practice model for adopting version control in your business.

Salesforce release management for higher education: webinar recording

Ellis Toms on March 21st 2018

Gearset’s higher education webinar explores how to tackle some of the real-world release management challenges faced by higher education institutions, and how Gearset can help streamline their release management.

The Salesforce Admin's guide to git

Kevin Boyle on November 8th 2016

Git has taken over the world in the past few years and for many, terms like version control, git and GitHub have become synonyms. This post digs into the jargon and sheds light on how #AwesomeAdmins that don’t currently source control their work can start to realise the benefits.

Salesforce DX - the new Salesforce developer experience

Matt Dickens on October 26th 2016

Team Gearset has returned from a fun and frenetic week at Dreamforce. As always, we had a great but exhausting time - we spoke to some of our fantastic users, we spoke to lots of people who are facing problems that Gearset might be able to help solve, we partied a lot less than we’d planned to due to aforementioned exhaustion, we tweeted some atrocious U2-related puns and we found out about all the cool new things that we can expect to see from the platform in the coming months, all to the backdrop of the world’s craziest party tech conference. One of the big talking points was Salesforce DX - Salesforce's new developer experience.

Deploying process builder flows and flow definitions via the metadata API

Matt Dickens on August 28th 2016

Have you ever run into any of the following error messages while attempting to deploy flows and flow definitions?

• The version of the flow you're updating is active and can't be overwritten
• You can't create a flow definition directly through the API
• Invalid version number: <insert version number>
• Insufficient access rights on cross-reference id

Rest assured, you're not alone - there's a healthy amount of discussion around best practices for deploying flows via Ant and the metadata API in the usual corners of the internet, and deploying via Change Sets comes with its own sizeable list of recommendations and caveats. Deploying flows is tricky.

6 practical tips to improve your Salesforce testing

Jason Mann on May 20th 2016

Testing your Apex code to make sure it's working correctly is essential for development on Salesforce. Effective testing protects your development investment, provides the confidence to make changes safely and quickly, and helps enforce business requirements.

It's easy to write tests that get you to the magic 75% code coverage requirement enforced by Salesforce. But writing great tests that really protect your work is a real skill. In our recent webinar, we discussed why and how we test in Salesforce, and demonstrated 6 practical tips to help you write great tests that don't become a maintenance headache.

Cloning Inbound Change Sets for mature Salesforce ALM

Kevin Boyle on March 9th 2016

A common strategy in any software project is to have a pipeline of environments.You start with a development environment to make the required changes, which are then promoted to a test environment for QA. Those changes get signed-off by your business users in a UAT environment before finally being deployed to production when all stakeholders are confident in the release.

Merging Salesforce metadata: How to merge Custom Objects and other Salesforce metadata

Kevin Boyle on February 15th 2016

One of the issues that commonly crops up when working together on a team is merging metadata or deploying only a small part of the work you’ve done.

This often happens if you have more than one developer working in a single developer sandbox, and is almost unavoidable when you work on a larger team with everybody in their own sandboxes.

So what is the best way to merge complicated Salesforce metadata?

Deploying changes between Salesforce Editions and the `Could not resolve standard field's name` error

Kevin Boyle on December 10th 2015

Salesforce make it easy to get started with the Force.com platform by providing developer.salesforce.com. Through this, you can provision a brand new Salesforce org in minutes, on which you can develop, experiment and test to your heart’s content, totally free. Best of all, these free dev orgs have all the bells and whistles turned on, with more or less every feature enabled by default. This allows you to try out features of higher editions that you might not have a license for in your own orgs.

Feature preview: Supporting continuous integration (CI) with Gearset Deploy

Stephen Chambers on September 15th 2015

One of the key goals for creating Gearset Deploy has been to make deployments to your Salesforce orgs as simple and painless as possible. If you develop for the Salesforce platform and need to perform deployments, you’ll be well aware that it can involve a number of repeated manual steps. One way to automate this process is through the implementation of a continuous integration development process.

Want to become an Apex expert?

Kevin Boyle on September 2nd 2015

In the Salesforce world of No Software, it’s no secret that we sometimes need to write code. Much less code than we need to on other platforms, but we still need to get our hands dirty from time to time.

I came to Salesforce from a Java and C# background, so when I transitioned to Salesforce I naturally approached it from the code angle ¹. I read as much as I could find to get up to speed on best-practice, and the single best resource I found was Advanced Apex by Dan Appleman. If you’re coming from another programming language and want to understand how to get the most from Apex and the Force.com platform, then this is the book for you.

Salesforce deployment best practices

Andrew Hunter on March 19th 2015

In any software development project, the riskiest point is always deployment time. It's often the first time that new features come into contact with the real production environment, and this means it's a time when a lot of the possible failure modes are concentrated.

With infrastructure deployments - such as the typical Salesforce deployment scenario - the stakes are higher still, as the users are dependent on the development team to fix all of the most critical problems that crop up before they start to interfere with their jobs.

Here are some things that can be done to manage deployments and mitigate the risks.