Getting reliable releases in a high-stakes environment
This public sector organization runs Salesforce across a single production org with seven product teams pushing code into a Dev → SIT → UAT → Production pipeline. With delivery mandates sometimes arriving directly from senior government leadership, the stakes around every release are extremely high.
For years, the team had been managing deployments with Copado — and before that, Flosum. By the time the deployment team lead spearheaded the switch to Gearset, the team had accumulated four years of workarounds, merge conflicts, and releases that regularly stretched beyond four hours.
The results after switching to Gearset were immediate. Releases that once consumed the better part of a working day now wrap up in under an hour. Off-cycle deployments, which had reached 60 in a single year on top of the 26 scheduled releases, have dropped significantly. And the organization’s CIO has made it clear that the business impact of Gearset is undeniable.
Struggling with merge conflicts and unreliable releases
When the team lead inherited Copado, he quickly became the single point of contact for every developer issue, support ticket, and deployment workaround the team needed to push through.
The core problem was merge conflicts. Copado’s handling of them was unreliable, and resolving them often meant that the only choice available was editing directly inside feature branches. Over time, the team also encountered a drift between what was in source control and what actually got deployed.
We pushed something in UAT and it functioned one way. Then it didn’t do the same thing in production.
Source format was another dead end. When the team investigated moving to a source-format repository, a more modern and maintainable approach, they discovered mid-process that Copado couldn’t support it in GovCloud environments.
“I had already wasted many hours going through the process to start moving to source format. And then we find out: no, we can’t do that in GovCloud with Copado. No one told us.”
Four hour releases starting at 4pm
Because it’s a government organization, deployments had to happen outside business hours. That meant starting at 4pm and committing to however long it took, even breaking to eat dinner in the middle of the release.
Releases were essentially four hours minimum. If we hit five hours or more, that’s where we need to stop this release. We can’t be here all night.
Part of the length was the sheer number of failures. The team had started separating deployments by product team to contain issues, but with Apex tests running on each deployment individually — each one taking 45 minutes or more — a release involving four teams could burn through that minimum almost on Apex testing alone.
The team felt the hit from working late on Thursdays and so Fridays became a write-off.
The business impact of constant workarounds
As a government organization, the team sometimes receives direction from senior government leadership requiring specific delivery dates regardless of what the deployment pipeline looks like. When the team couldn’t deliver, it wasn’t just an internal problem.
“The business units were unhappy. It was a huge pinch point. There were times I would bend over backwards and cut corners just to get business to the point where they weren’t ready to get the pitchforks out and come after us.”
The decision to switch
There was no single catalyst for making the switch to Gearset. For the team lead, it was “erosion over time”.
If someone wanted to raise a support ticket with Copado, they’d come to me — and I’d have to manage it, chase the developers for answers, and hope Copado managed to respond in less than a day.
The support experience with Copado had become its own problem. First responses to tickets frequently arrived with links to documentation the team had already read. One issue — a static code analysis integration — ran for months before Copado’s own support team discovered the problem was in their partner’s database.
From four hours to 45 minutes
After implementing Gearset, the results came immediately. Releases that had stretched to four hours or more were wrapping up in 30 to 45 minutes.
The first release we ran with Gearset, everyone was beside themselves! They were joyful that they weren’t going to have to eat dinner in the middle of it.
Off-cycle deployments — which had been running at more than double the scheduled cadence — dropped significantly. Business units, who had previously been the biggest source of pressure on the team, now frequently send unsolicited positive feedback.
“The business frequently tells us how wonderful things are now, and that releases are so much more enjoyable.”
Support that actually helps in minutes not days
What matters to the team lead isn’t just the speed of the support, but the quality of what the Gearset team comes back with. “I want to say the biggest part of it was the in-app support chat and realizing that we’ve got engineers available in a few minutes if we need them.”
Even before we purchased — I could already see Gearset was going to be better than Copado.
The in-app chat has also changed how his team operates day-to-day. Under Copado, he was the bottleneck: every question from every developer came through him. With Gearset, team members can get help directly. “My response now is: what did Gearset’s in-app chat tell you? Oh, you haven’t asked them yet? Well, that’s where you need to start. Gearset has, honestly, the best support I have seen in my career.“
Governance and visibility — built in
As both cybersecurity lead and deployment team lead, he cares about knowing what’s happening in production. Change monitoring gave him that visibility without the anxiety he’d felt before.
“With Copado, if I’d seen a new item in production, my first response was: who pushed something to production without us knowing? Now, it’s most likely an end user who added something to their dashboard. And it’s so easy to look and confirm.”
The PR approval process — which routes developer code through source control before it can reach higher environments — has also helped enforce the standards the team needs. And Gearset’s reporting features have given management the visibility they want without manual effort.
“Management loves that the information is right there in Gearset — it’s easy for us to provide that to them, and they really appreciate the visibility.”
What the team would say to others still using Copado
“Gearset is the only clear choice at this point. Salesforce is a living thing that changes frequently, and Gearset keeps up. It does an excellent job. I would not recommend any other product.”
