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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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!

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  • 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!

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  • 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.

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  • The business case for DevOps

    Ben Assirati on November 20th 2020

    The overwhelming adoption of new technologies throughout every industry has introduced an inevitable necessity for businesses to find the best ways to not only avoid falling behind, but to pull ahead. A proven - and indeed necessary - way to achieve this success is to build a robust and rewarding DevOps plan.

    DevOps, in simplified terms, is a set of processes designed to merge development and operations teams so they can work more efficiently, and deliver greater value. This integration provides a raft of benefits to the business, with some of the most significant listed below.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • DevSecOps: How DevOps embraces security

    David Runciman on August 26th 2020

    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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • Backups for Salesforce: download the complete guide now!

    Ellie Dyer-Brown on July 17th 2020

    The complete guide to backups for Salesforce

    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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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

    Simon Breslaw on April 24th 2020

    This blog post gives you a sneak preview of the introductory chapter to our upcoming ebook on DevOps for Salesforce.

    Ok, let's start with a definition. 'DevOps' is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and operations (Ops) to help teams build, test, and release software faster and more reliably. In slightly less abstract terms, DevOps is the coming together of the people responsible for building applications (developers and admins) with the people responsible for releasing, monitoring and maintaining those applications (typically admins, team leads or release managers). Working more closely with shared patterns, practices and tools, DevOps has the ultimate end goal of completely blurring the lines between these two distinct roles. This blog post gives you a short overview of what DevOps is, and how every team working within the Salesforce ecosystem can benefit.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

    Version control for Salesforce: a practical guide to implementing git-based release management

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • Deploying process builder flows and flow definitions via the metadata API

    Matt Dickens on August 28th 2016

    Have you ever ran into any of the following error messages whilst 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 practises 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.

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  • 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.

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  • How does Gearset compare with Change Sets?

    Kevin Boyle on May 18th 2016

    One of the first ways that people move changes from one Salesforce org to another is Change Sets. For developers and admins that are new to Salesforce, or have simple orgs that don’t change often, Change Sets is often enough for them to manage their deployments. However, for people dealing with more complex or frequent changes to migrate, or who work in teams, Change Sets can be too limiting. The inability to reliably migrate changes to standard objects and deploying Profiles are two common situations where Change Sets come up lacking.

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  • 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.

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  • 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?

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • Gearset whitepaper - best-practice in Salesforce release management

    Jason Mann on August 28th 2015

    Gearset was founded on the idea of simplifying Salesforce deployments. Over the past year we’ve worked closely with the Salesforce community to create a service that delivers on that idea and provides real value to Salesforce users.

    Creating the service is only half the solution. It takes care of the how, but enabling simple Salesforce deployments also requires an understanding of the why: the thought process that controls when and where changes are moved between environments. It’s no good being able to deploy in a few clicks if your changes cause disruption to other users in your business.

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  • 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.

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  • Gearset takes the pain out of Salesforce deployments

    Neil Anderson on March 8th 2015

    Salesforce is famed for its easy development model. “Point and click” has made developers of us all, but when it’s time to deliver changes to end users, we hit a stumbling block. Our world of speedy feature development disintegrates into change sets, environments, test coverage requirements, and change tracking. Suddenly, the reality of how our updates might affect the organization – the organization that real people are logging into every day to keep our business running – dawns on us. Everything slows down. The fun stops. The pressure is on.

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