The State of Salesforce DevOps 2025

Over the last ten years, the way Salesforce development teams build and release has been transformed by the widespread adoption of DevOps. Tools and technical capabilities taken for granted on other software development platforms, such as version control, were once a relative rarity among Salesforce teams — but no longer. There are now very few teams (13%) with no ambition to begin their DevOps journey.

The significant trend in DevOps adoption is no longer the race to implement deployment tools, version control, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). We’re now seeing teams broaden their adoption of tools and processes to cover the whole DevOps lifecycle.

For example, since securing production orgs is vital for operational resilience, there’s been rapid take-up in recent years of data and metadata backups as part of a comprehensive approach to DevOps. A few years ago, backup adoption hovered at around 50%; it’s now the most widely adopted process at 70%.

As teams continue to explore the full lifecycle and broaden their DevOps implementations, we should expect to see most change around relatively under-adopted aspects of DevOps such as observability.

Adoption of tools to support stages in the DevOps lifecycle

Why do Salesforce teams adopt DevOps?

Adopting DevOps involves a culture shift, as well as introducing a variety of tools and processes. As such, adoption is never an overnight change, but a journey of DevOps maturity. Some teams will always be tempted to settle for the status quo.

So why are the majority of teams driven to adopt DevOps? There are several compelling drivers — covering everything from developers’ job satisfaction through to the acceleration of digital transformation projects. Together these far outweigh the hurdles teams can face when adopting DevOps.

The trend of focusing on release quality over quantity continues from last year — this emphasis is particularly prominent in large development teams.

It’s worth noting that many of the hurdles that can discourage teams from adopting DevOps are precisely the challenges that DevOps will address. Lack of capacity prevents teams from implementing DevOps, though DevOps would help them keep pace with workload once implemented. Security and compliance concerns hold up DevOps implementations designed to enhance security practices and ensure compliance. Leaders who recognize this dynamic will prioritize their DevOps investments.

Another obvious matchup is between budget constraints and expectations that DevOps will help secure Salesforce ROI. But in this case, budget is the most common challenge for DevOps adoption, while Salesforce ROI is the least likely reason to adopt DevOps. The business impact of Salesforce DevOps is covered later in this report.

Observability: the next frontier for Salesforce DevOps

Observability is an integral part of the DevOps lifecycle, widely adopted on other platforms. But for 49% of Salesforce teams, observability is off the radar.

The lack of observability is principally felt by end users, not development teams: 74% of the teams that don’t have observability tools most often learn about issues from end users. And without observability tools, it’s difficult for teams to assess how many bugs and errors aren’t reported or discovered at all.

The impact is also felt by the wider business: bugs caused a Salesforce outage at 21% of businesses in 2024. Teams with an observability solution are 50% more likely than other teams to catch bugs within a day and 48% more likely to fix them within a day.

Adopting DevOps practices and DevOps culture drives measurable improvements in teams’ performance for software delivery.

DORA metrics

There are many ways to measure DevOps success, but Google’s DORA software delivery performance metrics remain the gold standard for validating that DevOps adoption is producing the intended results. The DORA metrics are:

• Deployment frequency. A measure of how often changes are deployed to production.
• Change lead time. The time it takes for code changes to go from being committed to being deployed in production.
• Change failure rate. The percentage of deployments that result in a failure.
• Time to recover. The time it takes to recover from a failed deployment.

Since Salesforce deployments have historically been (and for some teams still are) incredibly time-consuming, we also like to measure how long this takes using an additional Deployment time metric. This overlaps with change lead time, but focuses specifically on the step of moving metadata between environments.

The findings this year show marked improvements compared to last year’s data for lead times, failure rates and recovery. In many ways, Salesforce teams now perform much like high-performing teams on other platforms.

Only deployment frequency remains almost unchanged on previous figures. The majority of teams continue to release somewhere between a few times a week or month, and there’s been no increase in the percentage of teams releasing daily.

Disaster recovery metrics

47% of businesses saw at least one data or metadata loss incident in 2024. Development teams have a stake in protecting their Salesforce orgs, and treating backups as part of DevOps improves performance for both delivery and recovery. We’ve used the two disaster recovery metrics to assess how teams perform in this area: RPO and RTO.

What makes an elite Salesforce DevOps team?

In previous years, the State of Salesforce DevOps has confirmed that teams adopting DevOps tools and cultivating a true culture of collaboration perform best against the DORA metrics.

The results this year show a strong correlation between the number of tools used to manage the DevOps lifecycle and success across a range of key performance indicators.

For example, teams with the most consolidated toolset are 5x more likely than teams with the largest number of tools to deploy in under an hour (66% to 12%), and 5x less likely to need a whole day to deploy (5% to 25%).

The same trend is clear for other KPIs. Teams using fewer tools:

• Deploy between environments faster
• Spend less of their overall time on deployments
• Release completed work sooner
• Ship fewer bugs
• See fewer data or metadata loss incidents
• And restore from incidents faster

Larger teams tend to use more tools, but this doesn’t account for the correlation between tools and performance. In fact, there’s no correlation between team size and performance. Teams of all sizes can streamline their DevOps tech stack and reap the rewards.

Almost all teams (95%) say that investing in Salesforce DevOps yields a return. But 66% haven’t even estimated their ROI — almost certainly because teams don’t mainly adopt DevOps for Salesforce ROI (as shown above), and where there’s a high level of confidence in ROI there’s less of a requirement to show exact figures.

Many teams, however, need to justify their DevOps investments and report on monthly ROI from Salesforce DevOps. The survey data shows how much ROI development teams of different sizes can expect to see from a DevOps implementation.

Salesforce DevOps ROI reported by teams

Quality matters most

How do teams calculate their DevOps ROI? DevOps improves both the quality of work delivered and accelerates project delivery. Most teams (69%) can’t choose which of these adds more value to the business.

However, of the teams that do lean one way or another, more than twice as many see quality as the most important — 22% to 9%. The larger the business, the more important quality becomes. At large enterprises (with more than 10,000 employees) 28% most value quality compared to 8% that most value productivity.

There’s an obvious challenge: it’s harder to measure the business value of software quality than it is to measure faster releases and the pace of software delivery. Teams need to be able to connect improved quality to wider organizational performance.

ROI calculations based on productivity often build a compelling case for DevOps investments, since the average developer spends between 10% and 25% of their time on Salesforce deployments. But these calculations are always an underestimate of the true value DevOps delivers for the business.

The vast majority of businesses are investing in AI: 86% will explore new use cases in 2025, and 37% will optimize existing AI-enabled processes. Only 9% will pull back on AI in some areas.

But while Salesforce teams recognize the pace of innovation and the potential of AI, the best way to harness AI isn’t always clear. For 19% of teams, the biggest hindrance to AI adoption is simply not finding a use case. This is as significant a hindrance as compliance, security and cost.

Larger enterprises face different hurdles for AI adoption

The rate of AI adoption is consistent across organizations of all sizes. But the hindrances to AI adoption are different. In organizations with fewer than 500 employees, the most common hindrance is cost (21%). In large enterprises with more than 10,000 employees, only 13% report cost as the main hindrance. Compliance (27%) and security (25%) combine to become by far the most significant hindrances.

AI adoption is grassroots

Most respondents feel that they are adopting AI faster than their team, and their team is adopting AI faster than their business. 61% say they personally use AI in their work, 41% report team-wide adoption of AI, and 37% report AI-driven business initiatives.

Variation by industry is stark

There are big discrepancies between industries. For example, among respondents working in tech firms, 34% report business-wide adoption. In contrast, no respondents working in government report adoption at an organizational level.

Every year, the State of Salesforce DevOps has shown that teams using Gearset outperform teams using other DevOps solutions — and 2025 is no exception. Teams using Gearset are: