Transcript
Jack McCurdy. I am DevOps advocate here at Gearset, and I am really excited today to take you through the state of Salesforce DevOps twenty twenty two survey results.
Those of you that have been with us for a while or following Gearset for a while, might remember that this was the topic of conversation, for the very first summit that we did where we shared the twenty twenty one results with you. So, it's really exciting to have it come around another year and be able to do this presentation for you.
I've been in the Salesforce DevOps space for a few years now. And over that time, I've helped a lot of different Salesforce teams, firstly, to take the pain out of their deployment processes, and then on top of that, build a proper DevOps process for Salesforce.
As I said, I'm really excited to share this year's survey results with you. The state of Salesforce DevOps surveys are such a great opportunity for us all to pull together our experience and insights. So what we're then able to do is to step back and see how the Salesforce ecosystem as a whole is doing when it comes to DevOps.
You will all know your own team's DevOps process, and a large number of you have been eager to tell us about the challenges and the opportunities that you face.
Now here's your chance to find out whether those are common or unique to you, whether your DevOps performance is right up there with the best, or if you're actually lagging behind a bit.
So who took part in this year's survey, which is only the second ever?
In total, one thousand and sixty two people completed the survey, which is an absolutely outstanding response. So a massive thank you to everybody who took part. All of that contribution is really, really valuable, And it's fantastic to see that people joined in from all around the world, which truly reflects Salesforce's global presence and is reflected by the attendees here today.
We also have people take part from every major industry and sector.
Although it's unsurprising to see that tech is really well represented, all kinds of businesses are using Salesforce, and we're privileged to have every major verticals contribution to the survey as well.
And finally, there's a good spread in terms of company size. Folks in small start ups, giant enterprises, and everything in between all took the survey too. So what this does is this gives us a really nice representative dataset from which we can draw a lot of insight that will be be applicable to the whole industry.
So let's take a look at how these teams are performing. What we're gonna do first is we're gonna whiz through seven key metrics.
The data is well worth digging into to see how your team compares, and you'll soon be able to do just that by downloading the report when it's available to go through all of the information that we're presenting today at your own pace.
Firstly, we'll start with the big one, deployment times.
Forty one percent of teams now say that they usually deploy within an hour, which is awesome.
Deployment success is the foundation of DevOps success, and you can't begin thinking about a DevOps implementation or advancing that journey if your deployments are taking longer than five hours.
I'm sure plenty of you have painful memories of slow deployments with change sets, or maybe for some of you, that is still a reality.
And, ultimately, if your deployments are taking a long time, they shouldn't.
A plethora of tools are available to us now to enable super quick deployments, so this is an area you can instantly improve on if you're still experiencing some pain.
Release frequency is a really, really important metric.
As you can see, the average Salesforce team releases a few times a month.
Whilst this is great to get real agility, teams need to aim to release more frequently than that. Of course, DevOps just isn't about velocity, but upping your release frequency does bring some serious benefits.
Mainly, it helps you tighten the feedback loop so your end users can let you know if your development work is going in the right direction.
Shipping your work in smaller, iterative slices also makes your packages easier to debug when things go wrong.
Automating your deployments as part of a CICD process is essential for increasing release frequency, But automating your pipeline isn't always easy.
The survey found that lots of teams regularly need to unblock stalled CI jobs. That's a sign that the process wasn't ready for automation or deployment packages are too large.
We can also see that ten percent of teams release at least once a day, and that's what we consider elite DevOps performance. Our friends in the Salesforce team over at Intercom are an inspirational example in this area, and they release three to four times a day, which is just enough than as we release here at Gearset.
Lead times are what your end users and your product owners really care about. How long do they have to wait for a feature from the point they request it to the point that it's in their hands?
And this obviously correlates with release frequency, and most teams have a lead time of between a week and a month.
And cycle time also correlates with release frequency.
The more often that you release, the sooner that you can deliver work to end users.
Cycle time, that is the period between the work item being finished and released, is really a measure of the inefficiency caused by your infrequent releases.
And thirty two percent of teams have a cycle time between a week and a month. So as we can see, there's a lot of potential here to give your end users what they want a lot sooner.
Next, we have change failure rate, that being the percentage of releases that include a bug or error and therefore a good indicator of release quality.
Teams that do more testing during their release cycle reduce their change failure rate, which is obviously no surprise.
Release quality is massively important to absolutely everyone, and that's not just because end users are getting better features that work as they intended to and what they actually asked for. Bugs and errors are an absolute pain to fix and inevitably cost precious time to do so when it happens.
Unfortunately, errors seem to be still pretty common. In fact, nineteen percent of teams have bugs in their releases more often than not. So keeping change failure rates low is a clear sign that you're an elite DevOps team and it's something that you should be really, really proud of.
The good news is, though, that most teams can recover from bugs and errors pretty well.
Anyone who's using a solution like Gearset or has a robust release process in place will easily be able to roll back those errors.
The high performance that we see in this area probably reflects the move away from traditional change sets and towards proper deployment tooling.
Teams are slower to restore from a data loss than they are to recover from a bug or error, though, and plenty of people don't think their org has seen a data loss incident at all. However, elsewhere in the survey, we find that some teams are still lacking a robust backup solution.
Twenty nine percent just export data from Salesforce, and sixteen percent don't back up at all. This means the majority of teams really aren't prepared for a data loss.
You might be thinking that backups aren't your department, that it's owned by Infosec or Central IT or somebody else and that you're not in that, you're not alone.
In fact, lots of Salesforce teams told us that they believe backups are somebody else's responsibility.
But as most of you know, if you're building on Salesforce, editing things, changing things every single day, backups are your responsibility even if it's shared with another team.
DevOps is all about breaking down silos, and that means integrating backup and security with DevOps.
Time to restore is a key metric for assessing your resilience, and it demonstrates the ability to recover quickly from anything that corrupts or damages your org, and it's another mark of an elite DevOps team.
So all of those statistics considered, where does that leave your team in particular?
To categorize teams by performance, this year, we focused on three of those seven metrics, release frequency, change failure rate, and time to restore.
Each of those in turn reflect your release velocity, your release quality, and your resilience.
So this table shows you what a low, medium, and high, and elite performance looks like.
In each of those three areas, a hypothetical elite high performing team releases at least once a week, has a change failure rate of under twenty five percent, and a restore time of within a week.
And from the survey results, you're probably sitting there thinking and wondering roughly how many teams are in each of those categories. And to be honest, most teams won't fit neatly into any one of those categories at all. The majority are medium to high performers, we find, with slightly more being in that medium category.
It's interesting to consider what your strengths and weaknesses are as just one percent of teams are fully elite, but twenty three percent of those surveyed are at least in one area, twenty three percent of those elite.
At the opposite end of the table, less than one percent are truly low performers, another encouraging statistic, but forty two percent, is just under half are low performers in at least one of those areas. So have a think about your strengths and weaknesses. And if you're comfortable sharing, maybe drop it in the chat.
Looking at that handful of teams, that is to say the fewer than one percent that are early in all three categories, it's interesting to see that they share a set of characteristics.
They use version control and CI with version control as the source of truth. They use a third party DevOps solution.
They say their process is getting easier to manage and more established, which they rarely deploy outside of.
When it comes to test, they do so with realistic test data and that they have automated backups as part of their release process.
All of that culminates into in culminates to DevOps increasing the ROI of their Salesforce investment, which we know is often significant.
Those elite teams have all the right tools and processes as well as the right mindset for DevOps, of course. But what about everybody else? Do they have the tools, processes, and culture in place to move towards more mature DevOps?
Well, this is what the picture looks like for the adoption of DevOps tools themselves.
The first thing you'll notice there is that a large number of teams already use or plan to adopt source control and CICD tooling with only a minority not planning to adopt them this year.
With version control and CICD being the core tools needed, I think we can safely say that Salesforce teams are sold on DevOps.
And in general, the majority of teams already have DevOps tools or plan to adopt them this year.
There is a snag, though. Last year, the results were similar. So there's massive enthusiasm for DevOps and DevOps tools, but some teams haven't actually managed to adopt tools in the past year as they'd hoped.
So why have some teams not got as far with DevOps as they planned?
Well, we asked what the biggest obstacle was to DevOps adoption.
On the left are all the answers relating to tools and processes, and on the right are all the answers that relate to people.
As you can see, teams are experiencing a lot of people related challenging, totaling sixty seven percent of all answers.
The biggest standout is that lots of people are struggling to get buy in from stakeholders outside of their team. They say they struggle to convince decision makers to invest or that DevOps is not a top business priority.
The good news is that the ROI of Salesforce DevOps is clearer than ever, and this will help teams convince those decision makers to invest and that DevOps is worth pursuing.
It's also clear that some teams still face cultural challenge from within the team. The second most common answer to this question is that people are facing a steep learning curve for DevOps concepts.
Building knowledge of DevOps concepts and ways of working is crucial to effective DevOps and is a key part of the cultural shift.
So those two themes are the ones that we're going to explore. First, the DevOps culture challenge within Teams and then how to show the ROI of DevOps to decision makers.
Now it's absolutely imperative that we don't overlook people and culture when we're thinking about DevOps.
Adopting DevOps requires a cultural shift that goes beyond just using new tools and automating processes, all the shiny bells and whistles.
I said it earlier. DevOps is about collaboration and breaking down silos between teams.
All members of a team, that is to say developers, admins, architects, release managers, should share responsibility for releases.
There should be clarity, communication, and understanding within the whole team around what is being delivered and how from start to finish.
To achieve clarity and understanding, you need buy in from the whole team. If people don't understand the value of DevOps, they'll look to cut corners or ignore the process entirely.
And to become an elite team, there must be a defined release process that everyone understands, values, and follows.
Finally, DevOps culture means an eagerness to keep improving, be it the processes, the way you communicate, the way you use technology.
Inertia or reluctance to change will massively hamper the progress in adopting DevOps and its ongoing success.
Without this culture, teams will find it hard to be truly agile no matter how advanced their tools and processes are.
The good news, though, is that most Salesforce teams are bought into DevOps and understand its value.
Almost all teams believe DevOps will produce the eight benefits that we've shown here.
For example, ninety nine percent of respondents expect expect to see increased productivity as a direct result of DevOps, and they also expect improved quality of releases, better collaboration, and more value delivered to customers.
And that's hugely, hugely powerful, and it shows absolutely no doubt that the ecosystem recognizes what DevOps can do for it.
It's clear that people have the right attitude and are embracing DevOps as a concept.
But having high expectations of DevOps doesn't always translate into a real DevOps culture. We can see that for lots of teams, collaboration in particular is still lacking. The teams that say their release process got harder to manage last year most frequently blame difficulties with collaboration.
Less than half of respondents think they have already achieved better collaboration across their team. And, crucially, fifty four percent that they say that they deploy outside of their defined release pipeline some or most of the time or don't have a release pipeline at all. A truly collaborative culture involves everyone working together and sticking to an agreed process.
It's really promising that teams are embracing tools and processes to help them collaborate more easily. For example, two thirds of teams are now using ticketing software like Jira as well as version control to support that collaboration.
But it's not having the tools that counts. It's how people, teams, and you use those tools to be successful.
Many teams are also finding that they need to develop more DevOps knowledge and experience. Respondents rate a steep learning curve for DevOps concepts as the second biggest obstacle to Salesforce DevOps adoption.
Fifty three percent of those teams who find their processes got harder to manage last year say it's due to lack of team experience, which is the joint most common answer.
Gaps in knowledge can mean a few different things. Team members may be unsure of how to use the tools. They may be unaware of part everybody plays in their release process, or they lack the knowledge about the key DevOps principles and the importance of things like version control.
DevOps is a team sport, and even if one of your team members doesn't know what process to follow or doesn't understand the workflow, it can compromise everything that you've built.
This comes back to collaboration again. Lack of knowledge and training can block effective teamwork. Therefore, training is a key component to growing and nurturing DevOps culture.
Fortunately, the majority of Salesforce teams want to prioritize training and learning in twenty twenty two. Training and up upscaling is the most popular way Salesforce teams intend to meet the challenges of the coming year, with sixty one percent of respondents planning to focus on it. This is apparent across whole businesses, not just Salesforce teams, with forty three percent saying that their business is prioritizing staff development and training this year, which is will be absolutely imperative to staff retention as well as recruitment when it comes to staying competitive in the quite frankly bunkers labor market we're in at the moment.
Of course, this upscaling could come in any form. For Salesforce teams, it's imperative that the training is focused on teamwork, bringing up the DevOps knowledge of each person, and this can then help solve issues with collaboration and promote the cultural shift required for effective DevOps.
Remember, the main obstacles to DevOps adoption were the problems with the culture within as well as getting buy in from decision makers outside the team. So as well as culture, the business case for DevOps is another key area for teams to focus on if they're to make progress with DevOps later this year.
Let's look briefly at DevOps ROI, which is crucial for making the business case for DevOps to decision makers.
The headline stat here is that eighty five percent say ROI from their Salesforce investment has increased thanks to DevOps.
In other words, Salesforce teams are incredibly confident that their companies should adopt DevOps to get higher dollar return.
And this number is actually higher at larger companies, sitting at ninety one percent for respondents working at a large enterprise.
And let's dig into those numbers a wee bit. In total, thirty seven percent reported returns of over ten thousand dollars per month, with almost ten percent saying that they save more than fifty thousand dollars per month. Veolia, the leading multinational waste, water, and energy management services provider, are a great recent example of this. Over the last year, they've adopted Salesforce DevOps, and as a result, it saved hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They told us that their ROI directly related to overhauling their DevOps process was more than five hundred percent and even set to rise over the coming year.
The elephant in the room, of course, is that forty six percent of survey respondents didn't even know their ROI.
Remember, it's five percent. We're confident that they have increased ROI, but many can't put a number on it, which could reflect why teams struggle to get the wider business to invest in the DevOps processes that they're asking for.
Clearly, the key is empowering Salesforce teams to explain to decision makers how ROI is achieved and quantify it for them. And together, we need to put together the business case for Salesforce DevOps to a nontechnical audience that speaks to them in their language and that will help us achieve our goals, which are ultimately one and the same between us and leadership.
So let me sum up.
It's clear that Salesforce teams are sold on DevOps. They're adopting DevOps tools and want to increase their use massively.
They're super confident that DevOps brings a whole load of benefits to their team.
They can see its impact on their performance. They're sure it benefits the business, and they've saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. But there are the obstacles, perhaps the most important among them, building the DevOps culture and making the business case for DevOps.
If you want help with those, I highly encourage you to get in touch with us. Anyone here at GearSat will always be happy to give you advice and point you towards more resources to support you on your journey.
And be sure to download the state of Salesforce DevOps twenty twenty two report. I'm sure you're all screaming in the comments. Where can we get this report? It will be slated for release in the next week or so, and we'll be sure to let you know when that's available. You'll be able to pour over the data again, benchmark your performance against the rest of the ecosystem, and get a whole load more insights from our analysis.
Thanks very much for listening to me. I hope you find the figures interesting in an area eager to dissect the results for a little bit more. If you have any questions, feel free to email me, jack m at gear set dot com. Hope you enjoy the rest of the summit, and I'll speak to you again in a short while.
