DevOps is now critical for every organization to deliver Salesforce projects to end users accurately and fast enough to meet demand. But DevOps is a journey — organizations should take a step-by-step approach to be successful in implementing new release processes.
Companies have already adopted core DevOps practices like CI/CD, metadata backups, and data backups. Looking ahead to 2024, adoption rates look set to continue rising. These strategic moves are critical for disaster recovery and resilience in the face of unexpected events. As organizations implement these mechanisms, they pave the way for faster pipelines and stronger processes.
The evolution of DevOps tools introduces flexibility, making it easier to accommodate a wide range of Salesforce roles. A unified process benefits everyone, whether they are experienced developers or beginners exploring low-code solutions.
In this report, teams can learn about the key DevOps trends to look out for in 2024 and how to stay ahead of the curve.
Executive summary
The State of Salesforce DevOps survey continues to grow year-on-year and remains the largest annual survey of its kind. This year 1,296 respondents took part, answering questions on a wide variety of topics and sharing key insights into the priorities for Salesforce teams in 2024.
1 Salesforce DevOps is being democratized
The majority of Salesforce teams now report that they’re using the same DevOps process for all metadata types and roles. This is a shift away from release management split by role: admins using clicks, developers using code.
Read on to find out:
How many teams have democratized their Salesforce DevOps
Which metadata types teams are struggling with
The impact of democratizing DevOps on Salesforce ROI
2 Migrating to permission sets remains high priority
Salesforce continue to promote permission sets as the way forward, and consequently teams are prioritizing their migration from profiles this year.
A surprising number of teams have already completed the migration and are seeing faster releases for all other Salesforce development.
Unlock the full report to discover:
When teams are planning to complete their migration
Which teams are predicting the earliest migration dates
The differences in delivery speed for teams who have already transitioned
3 Compliance requirements are on the rise
Teams continue to add more packages and clouds to their Salesforce orgs, to accommodate more business processes and meet rising customization demands. But as orgs grow and hold more data, teams are facing stricter compliance requirements.
This report includes:
How many teams have at least one security framework in place and how many are working towards additional compliance standards
What teams report as the most beneficial factors in staying compliant
4 Salesforce-specialist backup solutions offer the best protection
The majority of businesses are now investing in backup solutions to safeguard their business-critical Salesforce data. This protects businesses from downtime and reputational damage, while giving Salesforce teams peace of mind if things go wrong. However, there are a variety of backup solutions available and teams are seeing different levels of success based on their solution of choice.
Keep reading to uncover:
Which backup solutions teams are using
How often teams are backing up their data and how quickly they can restore lost data
Which teams experience data loss incidents the most frequently
DevOps adoption
Teams increasingly see DevOps as the gold standard for Salesforce release management.
What tools and processes are teams using?
Each year, we’ve seen the number of Salesforce teams implementing DevOps rise — and the same is true this year. It’s clear that Salesforce teams are confident in their DevOps investment.
For better change-tracking and visibility over their release pipeline, 86% of teams have already adopted version control or plan to adopt it this year, and for CI/CD the figure is almost as high at 81%. Establishing these processes will help teams to streamline their releases and accurately manage changes, fulfilling project requirements without being blocked by inefficiencies in their process.
Teams are also looking for other ways to improve release quality, with sandbox seeding earmarked for adoption by the largest number of teams.
And security is now taken more seriously. We’ve seen a huge increase in teams using backups, demonstrating that teams recognize the need to protect their data for futureproofing and compliance. Backup adoption rates were low just a few years ago, but now only 13% of Salesforce teams don’t plan on securing their data.
What generates DevOps ROI?
DevOps adoption is largely driven by the fact that teams see a clear return on their investment. DevOps tools more than pay for themselves, and they also help teams get greater value from their existing investments in Salesforce and development teams.
Last year, teams identified increased productivity as the largest driver of DevOps ROI, so this year we wanted to understand what makes teams more productive.
Many more teams attribute ROI to release quality (54%) than speed of delivery (33%). Improved quality of releases boosts productivity, as teams spend less time unpicking failed deployments or issues in production. It’s interesting to see that collaboration and security are also prized for business value, demonstrating that more Salesforce teams than ever expect to see a return on investment in culture and resilience.
DevOps performance
The DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics were developed by a Google research group to measure the performance of DevOps teams.
For this report, we’ve used the four original DORA metrics, and coupled them into pairs based on speed and stability:
Speed
Deployment frequency: The number of times per day that code is released to production.
Lead time for changes: The time it takes for code changes to go from being committed to being deployed in production.
Stability
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.
Teams that score highly across these metrics show good levels of DevOps maturity, as they’re able to quickly deliver great quality releases and respond to changing business requirements.
While teams may lean more towards speed or security, mature DevOps processes help achieve both.
Speed
Deployment frequency
A high release frequency allows teams to quickly fulfill user and business requirements, as well as rapidly implementing improvements when needed.
The percentage of teams releasing to production daily has almost doubled over the last year, while the teams who only release multiple times a year has halved. As a whole, the data still shows a bell curve with most teams releasing semi-frequently, typically at the end of sprints.
A higher release frequency goes hand in hand with reduced lead times.
Lead time for changes
DevOps encourages teams to ship small and often, delivering value to end users as quickly as possible and allowing for quick feedback loops — so lead times are a good measure of DevOps maturity.
The majority of teams (61%) keep lead times for changes under a week — a strong performance. This data hasn’t shifted dramatically over the last couple of years, which may be a result of “reduced lead times” being the least valuable driver of DevOps ROI.
Stability
Change failure rate
Change failure rate is a good indicator of release quality and demonstrates how effective teams’ testing processes are.
For 11% of teams, deployments cause bugs and errors more often than not, and another 18% of teams aren’t doing much better. Change failure rates have actually increased over the last year. This could reflect that teams are tackling more complex types of development, such as CPQ which is notoriously difficult to deploy. But it could also highlight that teams have more effective monitoring and observability strategies in place, helping them to identify bugs that may have previously gone unnoticed.
Time to recover
It’s almost impossible to completely avoid bugs or errors, but shorter recovery times mean less down-time for end users and fewer consequences for business continuity.
The story here is similar to change failure rates: most teams are managing a reasonable performance, but a significant minority are struggling, and recovery times as a whole are longer than last year.
Who are the elite teams in 2024?
Some teams are excelling in their DevOps journey and reaping the rewards.
Each year, we use our survey data to identify the traits that correlate with elite DevOps performance.
This year, we’ve found that elite teams show:
Technical maturity. They have the tools and process in place for an advanced DevOps workflow, including CI/CD and version control.
Cultural maturity. They have “excellent” levels of collaboration across the Salesforce team.
Without both technical and cultural maturity, Salesforce teams can’t maximize the true ROI of DevOps — you need a collaborative culture across the team, and company, in order to use DevOps solutions and practices to their full potential.
Only 8% of respondents fit these criteria for being part of an elite team. These teams outperform non-elite teams across all the DORA metrics:
Elite teams are building and releasing quicker than other teams, and these releases have fewer bugs. When bugs are released, elite teams can recover quicker.
DevOps training is linked to higher Salesforce ROI
DevOps teams ship often, monitor release performance, then iterate and improve — and training should be approached in the same way.
How often do Salesforce teams receive training?
Regularly engaging in DevOps training gives Salesforce teams the knowledge and confidence to continuously improve their release processes.
The majority of teams surveyed (84%) receive some form of training on Salesforce releases, with the largest group reporting that they receive training at least monthly.
Teams that receive training at least once a month release to production more regularly and report a more collaborative culture than teams that were trained less frequently. Better collaboration is the second most influential driver of ROI for Salesforce teams, so it’s unsurprising that there’s a strong relationship between training and Salesforce ROI.
What training do Salesforce teams want?
When asked what training would be of most benefit, teams show greater confidence in how to build features and are instead looking to learn more about how to manage releases, as well as building a DevOps culture.
Salesforce training impacts your bottom line
Regular training for Salesforce teams isn’t just good for performance KPIs — it can help maximize your return on investment. Of teams who receive training multiple times a month, 43% report Salesforce ROI of more than $50,000 per month compared to 28% of teams who receive training less frequently.
Teams looking to accelerate their DevOps performance and boost Salesforce ROI shouldn’t overlook the power of regular training in achieving those goals.
Salesforce DevOps is being democratized
The adoption of DevOps processes and tools in the Salesforce ecosystem has previously been split by role type, making it harder to achieve a mature DevOps process, but that’s no longer the case.
In traditional software development, DevOps encourages teams to merge the responsibilities of software development and operations. For Salesforce, DevOps looks slightly different.
Salesforce DevOps means bringing together the people responsible for building applications (typically developers and admins) alongside the people responsible for releasing, monitoring and maintaining those applications (usually admins, team leads or release managers).
Metadata deployment methods
In the early years of Salesforce teams adopting DevOps, most tools were code-heavy and a better fit for developers than low-code admins. This meant release management processes were split between role types, making it harder for Salesforce teams to access the full benefits of DevOps because silos were still intact.
However, the vast majority (73%) of teams now report that all metadata changes are built and deployed in the same way across their team.
With the availability of low-code DevOps solutions for the Salesforce platform, DevOps has become accessible to all members of Salesforce teams regardless of role or experience level.
A unified DevOps process delivers higher ROI
Getting everyone to use the same process helps teams unlock the full potential of a DevOps workflow. Teams with a unified deployment process show a significantly higher return on investment for Salesforce — 60% of teams with a unified process report monthly Salesforce ROI of more than $20,000, which is twice as much as teams with a split release process and almost ten times as much as teams with no agreed release process.
Larger teams are leading the way
Although it can seem challenging to get every member of a large team using the exact same tools and systems, Salesforce teams with 16–25 members are the most likely to have a single release process across their entire team.
Larger teams have a higher volume of changes that are developed and deployed simultaneously. Without an agreed development and release process for all metadata types, large teams begin to experience the pains of overwritten or conflicting changes sooner.
Meanwhile, it’s easier for smaller teams to maintain visibility and traceability, even if they’re split across different workflows — this may mean that establishing a unified release workflow isn’t seen as necessary.
What metadata is being left out?
For teams with a split process, there’s a lot of variation in which metadata types are being deployed outside of the DevOps process, but the most common were:
Just 1% reported that their team has split workflows based on role, with all admins’ changes being deployed in a separate workflow to their DevOps release process.
Teams without an agreed release process
Surprisingly, 6% have no agreed release process in place. These teams show the lowest levels of technical and cultural DevOps maturity: they have significantly lower rates of DevOps tool adoption, receive the least amount of training, and are the most likely group to rate team collaboration as “very poor”.
Most teams are harnessing the accessibility of Salesforce DevOps — investing in a unified DevOps release process is helping those teams deliver higher ROI.
Migrating to permission sets remains high priority
Despite changes to the expected end-of-life for permissions on profiles, most teams still plan to complete their migration to permission sets this year.
End-of-life for permissions on profiles
Salesforce has long signaled that orgs should move away from permissions on profiles and migrate to a security model using permission sets. In early 2023, Salesforce announced that it was set to retire permissions on profiles in Spring ‘26, pushing teams to migrate to permission sets instead. Shortly after the State of Salesforce DevOps survey went live, Salesforce reversed its decision and will no longer enforce the ‘26 end-of-life date for permissions on profiles.
When are teams planning to migrate to a permission set led permissions model?
The majority of teams (80%) still plan to migrate to permission sets before the original end-of-life date for permissions on profiles, with the largest proportion of respondents planning to complete the project by the end of 2024.
Teams with a unified release process have clearer plans for migration
As we covered in the previous section, most teams deploy all their metadata the same way — with one unified release process. For the teams who have a split release process, profiles and permissions are the most likely metadata types to be deployed outside of a team’s DevOps process. So we were keen to see if there was a relationship between release processes and migration dates.
The clearer teams are on their release process, the more likely they’ll know when they expect to migrate to permission sets.
The difference in projected migration dates suggests that incorporating permissions metadata into a DevOps release pipeline is helping teams move these metadata types more quickly and reliably than having a separated workflow for permissions — making it easier for teams to predict when they’ll be able to complete their migration.
Elite teams are ahead
Elite teams show even faster plans for migration, and are almost twice as likely to have already migrated to permission sets compared to non-elite teams. They also show significantly greater certainty around when they plan to migrate, suggesting effective and clear communication across these teams.
Teams are benefiting from migrating to permission sets
Profiles that include permissions become large, complex objects which are hard to manage and deploy.
Moving permissions to permission sets will significantly reduce the amount of metadata associated with profiles, as well as reducing the number of profiles needed in an org. Permission sets are more effective than profiles for maintaining separation of concerns and reducing the likelihood of conflicts — meaning teams can deploy more quickly and reliably.
Teams that have already migrated to a permission set based permissions model report drastically shorter deployment times compared to those who haven’t yet migrated to permission sets.
Salesforce continues to recommend that teams migrate to permission sets despite the end-of-life announcement being reversed — most teams seem aware of the benefits of a permission set led security model and plan to complete their migration this year. Teams that do proceed with the migration will set themselves up for greater DevOps success and be prepared should Salesforce issue an end-of-life date for permissions on profiles later down the line.
Compliance requirements are on the rise
As orgs expand and begin to house a wider variety of business data, Salesforce teams are inevitably finding that their work is subject to more compliance regulations.
Last year’s report identified that businesses are bringing more processes and data onto the Salesforce platform, increasing the number of packages and clouds that teams are adopting. But the growth in org data has implications for compliance.
Most teams have new compliance requirements in 2024
The majority of teams (82%) are already compliant with one or more security frameworks and 52% are working towards at least one additional framework in 2024.
Most teams have been very successful in their compliance journey so far, with almost half saying their orgs are rarely or never flagged in compliance audits. This is a great position for teams to be in, especially for those that are working towards additional compliance standards in 2024.
Despite teams gearing up to comply with additional frameworks, interest in relevant training is currently low, with only 34% of respondents saying they’d benefit from compliance training in 2024. We expect this demand to rise throughout the year, as more teams begin facing the challenges of getting a whole team successfully onboarded onto more than one framework.
Larger teams are spinning the most plates
There’s a strong positive correlation between the size of Salesforce teams and the number of frameworks they were required to comply with. The more regulations a Salesforce team has to comply with, the higher the probability their orgs will fall short of at least one of those regulations at audit.
However, the largest Salesforce teams (those with more than 25 members) bucked this trend, showing an impressive spike in their audit performance.
Demand for relevant training also increased with team size, highlighting that the largest teams understand how critical training is in achieving compliance.
Data management tools are the key to compliance
Compliance frameworks typically govern data management, including who can access and edit data, how long data is stored for, where it is stored, and more. So it’s no surprise that teams say data management tools are the most valuable for keeping their orgs compliant.
Teams that are working towards additional compliance obligations this year should ensure their DevOps process includes effective data management, in order to see success.
Salesforce-specialist backup solutions offer the best protection
Not all backup solutions are delivering the same results — those using third-party, Salesforce-specialist backup solutions are in the best position to recover when they experience data or metadata loss.
What backup solutions are teams using?
Backups are a core component of Salesforce DevOps — they not only protect your business-critical data but also give Salesforce teams peace of mind when releasing quickly. The vast majority of teams (87%) currently back up their Salesforce orgs or plan to implement backups in 2024.
Businesses are using a range of tools and solutions to protect their Salesforce orgs:
Salesforce Backup & Restore: a paid Salesforce solution that backs up and restores Salesforce data.
Salesforce Data Export: a Salesforce tool that creates downloadable CSVs of org data.
Third-party Salesforce-specialist solution: backup solutions that are specifically designed to back up and restore to Salesforce orgs.
Third-party generic solution: backup solutions that can be used across a variety of software platforms, including Salesforce.
A backup solution must enable teams to back up regularly and restore quickly when data or metadata loss does occur.
How often are teams backing up their data and metadata?
Teams using third-party Salesforce-specific solutions are the most likely to have backed up at least once a day, putting them in the best position should something go wrong. Teams running weekly backups risk losing as much as a week’s worth of data, even if they manage to recover from their latest backup.
What’s worrying is the number of teams using Data Export that report backing up at least daily. Data Export allows Salesforce teams to download a CSV of their org’s data once a week maximum. The number of teams reporting that they export data more regularly than that suggests some teams may have misunderstood the capabilities of Data Export and could be left without a recent backup to restore from if they experience data loss.
How quickly do teams recover from data and metadata loss?
Recovering from a data or metadata loss quickly helps to minimize the business impact, which is why a backup solution is only as good as its ability to restore data.
The longer Salesforce end users can’t access the data they need to do their job, the more money businesses lose. Long downtime from loss incidents can also do irreversible reputational damage.
Of teams who experienced a loss incident, those using third-party Salesforce-specialist backup solutions recovered quicker than those using any other solution. This reflects that Salesforce-specialist solutions are designed specifically to handle the nuances and complex data relationships that exist in Salesforce orgs, but it’s notable that they even out-performed Backup and Restore.
Third-party generic backup solutions can be an appealing option for teams with a large tech stack, as they can back up a variety of business systems using a single solution. However, these solutions are less equipped to handle Salesforce restorations, with fewer teams being able to recover in hours.
It’s unsurprising that teams using Data Export report the slowest recovery times. Data Export doesn’t include restoration functionality so teams will need to use an additional tool, such as Data Loader, in order to restore lost and corrupted data to an org from their exports. This adds extra complexity to the restoration process that can slow things down.
Who experiences loss incidents?
When asked about their experiences of metadata or data loss in the past year, 65% of teams reported experiencing at least one loss incident. Worryingly, a further 6% didn’t know whether they’d experienced a loss incident.
Backup solutions can’t protect businesses from experiencing data or metadata loss — they can only help teams to recover when incidents occur. However, there were trends between which type of backup solution a team was using and how likely they were to have experienced a metadata or data loss.
Teams with third-party Salesforce-specialist backup solutions are the least likely to have experienced a situation where data or metadata has been lost. This suggests these teams have a robust organizational culture of security, so are safeguarding their data more effectively than other teams.
Salesforce-specialist solutions are performing best
Those using third-party Salesforce-specialist backup solutions are the least likely to experience data or metadata loss but, if they do, they’re the most likely group to have a recent backup to restore from and are able to recover quicker than teams using other solutions.
How do Gearset users perform?
This year, Gearset users made up 32% of survey respondents.
We’re delighted to see that teams using Gearset’s full suite of DevOps solutions are leading the way when it comes to DevOps maturity and performance.
Gearset users are also twice as likely to release to production multiple times a day, and half as likely to spend extra time working on releases outside of contracted hours.
Survey demographics
Thank you to the 1,296 Salesforce professionals who took part in The State of Salesforce DevOps 2024 survey!