The brilliant rise of Salesforce has provided us with a platform that lives up to the expectation of improving customer relationships. Thanks to Salesforce, we no longer require work with on-premise ERP software that involves owning internal servers and large initial investments. Instead, we have a cloud-based and SaaS-based platform that evolves with our business needs.

Salesforce, like all software, needs a software development lifecycle to power our organisations. It requires accurate change management to ensure that any change is effectively communicated to the implementation team. Finally, configuring and building it correctly, so it gets authenticated and tested to deliver the benefits to the end-users. This process of managing change can be resolved by putting the methodology of DevOps into practice. It combines the efforts of software development and IT operations. Its goal is to reduce the software development life cycle (SDLC) while delivering features, fixes and updates necessary for meeting business objectives.  

Salesforce deployment process is a tricky situation which can sometimes be quite tedious for admins and consultants. Resorting to DevOps, or in easier terms following DevOps best practices to deploy your Salesforce applications will help you encounter these challenges. 

What is DevOps

First of all, let me get the “What DevOps isn’t?” out of the way. DevOps isn’t a process or a technology or a standard. It is more of a practice company adopt for creating a union of people, process, and tools for faster delivery. This practice helps to regulate the flow and narrow down the gaps between developers (who create new functionalities) and admins (who maintain production systems).

The meaning of DevOps can be understood clearly by the definition provided by Gartner.

“DevOps represents a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps emphasizes people (and culture) and seeks to improve collaboration between operations and development teams. DevOps implementations utilize technology— especially automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective.”

DevOps refers to an abstract term for focusing on key policies like  Continuous Delivery, Version Control,  Scalability, Security, Collaboration & Monitoring etc.  But what does that mean? Version Control refers to a mechanism for tracking and merging changes smoothly. Continuous Delivery (CD) means the configuration needed to create your applications is automatically stored and deployed from version control. 

DevOps for Salesforce

The scope of DevOps in Salesforce deployment strategy is a little different than in other platforms. As mentioned earlier, Salesforce provides SaaS, and enterprise SaaS apps are not distributed like traditional software as they provide continuous services. In public clouds like AWS and Heroku, it is done following pipeline stages like development, testing, staging and production. In the Salesforce platform, stages are replaced with sandbox environments, ephemeral scratch orgs and production instances. The reason behind is that Salesforce removes a lot of the complexity of other DevOps processes itself. Processes like managing infrastructure, scalability, hosting, and even tests. With the introduction of Salesforce DX, Salesforce consulting companies are usually on top when it comes to adopting robust DevOps practises.

DevOps for Salesforce application development is a necessity for effective collaboration and communication. It transforms the way teams in the organization work by expediting a cultural shift and enhances business’ ability to deliver applications faster and get ahead of time. DevOps for Salesforce development also assist the development team in releasing the latest features and enhancements for their users.  Which works a method of collecting customer feedback and enhancing the application based on that.

Developers often struggle with continuous delivery (CD) performance, testing delays, etc during the development process. To deal with this, Security and development teams must collaborate to keep the quick development life cycle going without reducing security with every update. So how can a development team reduce the SDLC without putting the integrity of the features and updates at stake? A feasible way of doing it is by learning key DevOps practices, so you can execute Salesforce deployment best practices to deliver reliable release management.

Best Practices for DevOps in Salesforce

Manage the source code while working in a shared Environment

Adopting a few practices of app creation can influence continuous delivery. Managing source code essential, but it is not the only component of a business solution.  Other components such as schema, user interface, access control rights and static components such as icons and images, take part in the creation process. Thus managing them is just as crucial as source code. They should all be recorded into the version control system (VCS) to keep track of any modification.

In low code platforms like Salesforce.com, working in a shared environment becomes a challenge. As multiple database administrations can come across each other’s changes when working in a shared environment. So make sure that developers are making changes in an isolated environment.

Functional Testing

The automated testing process is not an easy task to implement but essential for Salesforce. Selenium makes a great tool for testing functionality and should be part of your DevOps process. However, you must make several verifications before getting to the functional testing part. Open-source static code analyzers, such as PMD, are vital for your development team to ensure they are coding on a single technique. A good practice is to define a single coding method for your team and enforce its use. Once you are done with these automated tests, begin implementing a manual peer review. It can help recognise opportunities for performance enhancement where automated tools couldn't.

Advanced planning  to ensures all things are done

Agile planning is now standard practice for enterprise software development. Frequent face-to-face interactions and collaborations between team members are required so that the end-product can benefit from it. It will additionally require regular updating, monitoring and continuous delivery (CD) to the client during the development cycle.

For continuous delivery, make sure you define Features and Epics. User stories and tasks should be sized correctly and each story should turn up to an Epic that represents a particular feature. This allows your team to deliver small-sized functionalities that can be consumed by end-users and traced back to the release draft. 

Changes should be released in a pipeline with strict quality gates

Packaging in CD means tracking changes that can be released going forward into the next stage of the process. Development teams should establish a branch for each stage and store changes into a promotional branch. Release the changes in a specified pipeline with strict quality gates that assure the verification measures and execute the order of release stages. 

Development team members and developers should not be able to bypass stages of the development cycle. For instance, moving from development to production stage. Concentrate on implementing smaller changes, which is important for reliable, expected releases. Automate promotions before releasing to production. It enables your team to validate the promotion scripts in integration, test and staging. And ultimately,  lowers the possibility of unexpected results.

Track for more than just service availability and performance

Most SaaS companies only keep track of service availability and performance. Whereas top companies also monitor data access to identify abnormal configuration changes and track usage of end-user features to help product managers to gain insights on their usage.

Conclusion

Though there is a lot involved in the DevOps "best practice" approach. These are the key points that you need to focus on to ensure that your Salesforce team is following best practices. Recognize the issues you are struggling with and how the method you are adopting is going to resolve that issue. It's better if you do this while defining how your team works and their software development lifecycle. 

Evon Technologies helps professional developers to adopt DevOps tools and techniques for the Salesforce platform. We have put an enormous amount of research and experience before providing Salesforce development in India. Thus we understand that there is a spectrum of best DevOps practices out there but we will help you implement the ones that deliver immediate return on investment for your company. Connect with us for evaluation of needs or email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..