Streamlining deployments to reach DevOps success
An overview
Payroc is a global market leader in large payment processing, handling over $81 billion in transactions every year. Headquartered in Illinois, the team of 6 developers currently support around 250 Salesforce end users and pride themselves on working with an Agile approach — delivering the basics immediately and then continuing to add functionality weekly to cover all use cases.
Payroc didn’t have a formal deployment process and used a combination of tools, such as change sets, manual deployments, and the free tiers of other solutions. After becoming frustrated with increasingly unreliable deployments, Matt Bevins — one of the senior developers at Payroc — set out in search of another solution.
Treading on each other’s toes
The team were working in just one or two sandboxes, meaning that as the team grew it became difficult to avoid overwriting each others’ changes. “Working from a small number of sandboxes caused several challenges and headaches. We would have to pivot part changes to a newer sandbox so we could make sure we had the closest copy of what was in the production org. Sometimes we would have to abandon a release because other changes impacted our ability to deploy changes.” The team lacked a formal deployment process, which was slowing down their work. “It got to the point where we were doing deployments into UAT environments and it was just all over the place.”
Dealing with customers’ money means you can’t waste time and hold up releases of new features. The team were under pressure to test and deploy new features before the majority of their users in the USA were online — but without a formalized deployment process this was proving to be near impossible.
“Our deployments were a mess — everyone was treading on each other’s toes in the sandbox and it became so hard to check that changes weren’t being overwritten by someone else deploying from a different sandbox.”
The search for the perfect DevOps solution begins
In search of a complete Salesforce DevOps solution, the team at Payroc trialed a number of different vendors — pitting them against each other to find the right fit for them. Although some solutions offered good functionality, the team were faced with complicated user interfaces, missing features, and steep prices.
The team were looking for a few key features: integration with GitHub for version control, integration with Jira for tracking and visibility, and the ability to deploy a wide variety of metadata types.
“We trialed another solution but they wouldn’t let us deploy lightning email templates – something we really needed to do. This meant having to go back and use change sets. We thought ‘why would we pay for a solution when we still need to go back and use change sets?’, so we moved on to try other products.”
Matt and the team were determined to find a solution that would help them grow and progress. It was important to them that it could integrate easily with GitHub, with an intuitive user interface that made the process easy for all members of the team, particularly those working in less technical roles.
Additionally, it was crucial that they maintained the ability to track deployments and changes in version control so that they could cherry pick changes without overwriting a colleague’s work. But, finding a solution that fit the bill proved to be a challenge.
“Our previous solution didn’t allow part changes. If someone had started another user story, it would require manual post-deployment steps to make sure field permissions were given to users. We had no way to pick the changes related to the user story trying to be deployed.”
Finding and working with Gearset
During a three-day hackathon which aimed to deliver new value to the business, the team realized they had the perfect opportunity to improve their deployment process. Matt had used Gearset in a previous role and after hearing about the new launch of Pipelines, our Salesforce CI/CD solution, he decided to start a free trial. As well as being able to access all platform features, the team soon found that Gearset answered all their questions and met all their requirements, making it the complete deployment solution that they had been looking for.
“Gearset did everything we needed it to and having the ability to roll back changes is great. The other solutions just weren’t as intuitive.”
Gearset’s Pipelines remain a favorite feature for the whole team: “Knowing what’s changed and being able to pick changes quickly has completely revolutionized our deployment process”.
“We create a branch from master and merge that directly into integration. Pipelines keeps all our developer sandboxes in sync by creating back-promoting branches — each developer now has their own sandbox. Gearset lets us keep all sandbox in sync and has saved us so much time.”
Problems solved in 10 minutes
The journey doesn’t end there, as continued customer support is an integral part of the Gearset product. Matt and his team describe the live-chat feature as being particularly helpful, and one that makes the product “far more intuitive than other solutions, and really easy to use”.
“Everyone at Gearset is there to try and help you succeed. If we have any problems then we can jump on a live chat with Gearset’s team. We can diagnose what went wrong within 10 minutes and it’s just a matter of sharing a deployment ID to see where the errors are occurring from the logs and resolving them.”
Gearset makes changes happen in less than an hour
Since adopting Gearset, Payroc have been able to expand the team without compromising the efficiency of their work. “We were struggling with overwriting each others’ changes even though we’re a small team — I would have hated to be a team of 30! But now using Gearset means that we are able to grow and bring on more developers, knowing our changes can be merged easily.”
With Gearset, Payroc spend less time battling merge conflicts and despairing over failed deployments, and more time sharpening and refining their release pipelines.
“Gearset does everything we want, we’ve been so happy ever since we made the move.”
