Salesforce DevOps—What is it? 

As more businesses lean towards Salesforce development, the teams developing on the platform are facing higher demand concerns. Therefore Salesforce development teams adopt DevOps practices to meet business requirements because DevOps helps them deliver work faster, efficiently, and safely. Salesforce DevOps is a software development process that merges the concept of Agile, continuous integration, and continuous delivery to streamline the delivery of high-quality applications. 

DevOps is becoming popular in the Salesforce ecosystem, but it's still a new idea for many teams. They are practices designed to help teams build, test, and release software faster and more reliably. It arises from the need to merge the responsibilities of software development teams (‘Dev’) and operations teams (‘Ops’).

How is Salesforce DevOps different?

For Salesforce,  DevOps means bringing together the people involved in building applications (developers and admins) and the people in charge of releasing, monitoring, and maintaining those applications (release managers, team leads, admins). Salesforce developers can pick from a big pool of environments to work in; such as scratch orgs, developer orgs, sandboxes, and course production where all the data of your critical customer is stored.  They also get options to package a release in multiple ways, all depending on the project's requirements and its target audience. 

Salesforce DevOps comprises any part of the develop-release cycle that’s still manual but can be automated and there are four primary target areas for automation: 

• Unit Testing
• Backup 
• Tracking org changes
• Releases via continuous integration

These are some examples of how approaching DevOps from a Salesforce context can differ from  DevOps practices with other programs. Salesforce eliminates most of the complexity of other DevOps processes by handling infrastructure, scalability, hosting and even testing. Originally it used to be a responsibility of ops and after that DevOps is all managed by the Salesforce platform. 

Benefits of DevOps

An industry survey for 2019 by Google showed that efficient teams that have embraced DevOps practices deploy 208 times more frequently and make changes 106 times faster than others.

Although new to Salesforce, DevOps has been seen as the best way to create and manage software on other platforms. So it isn’t some new and baseless concept, but an approach with well-documented advantages.  It gives you agility which is the most important edge in technology,  which allows you to build, deploy, and release much faster and track code changes more efficiently. It enables your software team to handle the entire process end to end with very little coding effort, as a result, you get a simplified development process between the team.  The aim of implementing DevOps is to increase the ability of teams to provide new features and solve serious issues faster. So it’s no wonder that teams who use DevOps are the ones who gain the following benefits:

• Faster restore times during service outages
• Lesser bugs and service disruptions caused by poor-quality code
• Higher frequency of new releases to production

To conclude, teams that have implemented DevOps practices significantly surpass those that haven't.

Pillars of Successful Salesforce DevOps 

Integrating DevOps practices involves tools, processes, and practices but adopting DevOps for Salesforce doesn’t necessarily mean you have to make all the changes immediately.  Your team might already be involved in DevOps's agile development processes!

Version Control

Version control means keeping track of changes and records of earlier versions of an application’s code, metadata, and releases. It allows your team to review your contributions while making it feasible for multiple contributors to work on the same features with seamless team collaboration. Every developer contributes new project work within Git branches, which are integrated into the master branch afterward, which contains the latest and steady version of the project. 

How does version control benefit your team?

• Release quicker and more reliably 
• Bring down bugs through code review
• Handle code conflicts
• Safely allow parallel development streams along with branching
• Make the rollback process easier

Release Management

Release management intends to have a consistent set of repeatable, reliable, and resource-independent processes to gain optimal business value and optimize the utilization of resources.  Therefore, putting a proper process in place is crucial to handle your release cycle. Moving directly from development to production could set you back with an endless loop of unstable software, and that’s when you need release management.  It has to supply the needed environments for conducting the series of regression tests so that you can apply any required fixes until the rollout.

Release management best practices can be broken down into the following principles:

• Mitigating risks 
• Release cycles 
• Change management process
• Salesforce release process

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

Continuous integration (CI) builds on a Git-based workflow that automates the process of testing and validating changes, which can be deployed. While continuous delivery (CD) is about releasing recurring, minor changes to users through an automated process and bringing down the risks that come with big releases.

They help development teams to detect issues, identify bugs and fix those before delivering the end product to the customers. With continuous integration, a product is made to include and integrate each code modification on each execution, by developers. CI/CD binds everything together and guarantees your whole DevOps process runs smoothly without wasting developers' time, so they can do what they do best, develop!

Automated Testing 

Salesforce developers have to test at least 75% of any new code they deploy to a production org. Automation lets you test changes every time they are merged into your master branch or deployed to another environment. To gain speed and agility, the DevOps approach focuses on the automation of all processes in software development. This means automating the testing process and setting it to run automatically.  An agile DevOps setup also lets you inhabit development or testing environments with data from production, so you can review your code works with actual data. 

Automated testing helps you in:

• Saving time and effort by ensuring that your changes perform properly and can be deployed
• Guaranteeing that you’re developing the exact features that your organization requires with user acceptance testing
• Avoiding shipping faulty code and preventing existing functionality from breaking

Collaboration 

Collaboration and communication are the fundamental factors that help any organization expand and evaluate the need for DevOps. With the help of collaboration with business and development teams, the DevOps team can follow the process of designing and creating a culture. Version control already lets multiple team members work on the same application simultaneously and gets rid of the dependency factor. It promotes coordination, communication, and collaboration across your software development team by allowing teams to work in a distributed environment.

How do you Start with Salesforce DevOps?

It’s better to adopt DevOps processes slowly and work on them incrementally, rather than trying to accomplish everything at once. Remember, Salesforce DevOps is not just an initiative but a journey to perpetually enhance an organization’s practices and culture to deliver value to customers and gain improved business outcomes. Any organization that follows all the above pillars of Salesforce DevOps creates the right culture to get what it deserves, i.e., a DevOps organization.

If these practices of managing and deploying your applications seem a little complex, Reach us and eliminate that operational headache. Evon technologies can remove a lot of the complexity of DevOps, and make it easy for you to adopt each DevOps practice one at a time. Our software development company in India integrates DevOps, Agile, and the cloud, so email your business requirements to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..