Salesforce, a popular customer management system (CRM) provide a range of services to a business, its compatibility with other extensions is excellent, and an extensive list of mergers and acquisitions makes them an expert in various domains. They can use the Salesforce CRM to track customer activities, market to customers, and provide additional services. 

Azure DevOps however is a software as a service (SaaS) platform from Microsoft that brings development(Dev) and operation(Ops) teams together to deploy efficient applications while minimizing the development life cycle. It is bundled with a bunch of features that eliminate the technical and bureaucratic hurdles that can delay software deployment. Therefore,  leveraging DevOps for Salesforce is a priority for many companies but most face difficulties in integrating Salesforce with DevOps. Automation is the main factor in implementing DevOps in Salesforce. It requires using Version control to push code into production and the need for test automation at every step of the process, Build test, and deployment. We want to highlight how to apply DevOps to your Salesforce project. 

How do these two software solutions connect? 

When working with large projects, especially with corporations with more developers and testers, the complications of developing different features and deploying them straight in a production environment become more complex and time-consuming. This is because there needs to be something in place for version control to manage changes done by developers. Hence implementing Version Control by using DevOps is the first step in the DevOps process. 

Salesforce can be integrated into Azure to send data from the CRM to Microsoft cloud service leading to many benefits such as increased productivity and user and customer satisfaction. It lets the company develop and improve the product faster than they do with other software development approaches.  Companies looking to implement DevOps to Salesforce projects may do so through various options:

• Custom DevOps Toolchain
• Change sets
• Salesforce DX
• Release management and DevOps solutions 

You may either choose to integrate different third-party tools to create your CI/CD pipeline but the main challenge is that this process takes time to implement and demand research as to which tools will suit your ecosystem as well as how to integrate them best for the best productivity. Using multiple tools from different vendors over time can exponentially increase the project's cost. The other way to go is to leverage Salesforce DX or the Salesforce DevOps center. For that, you will need a serious investment in talent and time for set up. The better option is to link the Salesforce cloud with third-party integrations to push the delivery cycle but this again is not viable as the complexity and team size grows with time. 

DevOps for Salesforce

There has been a lot of buzz around the Salesforce DevOps Center for the past couple of years. It is a free deployment tool developed internally by Salesforce that is now generally available. Before the DevOps Center, the only comprehensive tools available were those developed by third parties on the AppExchange but those came at a price. 

At its core, DevOps Center is a tool to help teams release technology faster. It lets you drive changes between Salesforce development environments using visual development pipelines, source control using GitHub, and automatic change tracking for your environments. The DevOps Center has the following functionalities:

Automated Change Tracking: The DevOps Center will automatically track the changes as soon as the development team makes changes in their sandboxes, which means that you have total transparency into items that need upgrading through environments. 

Source Control: Teams using the DevOps Center can integrate with GitHub source control, with better visibility of who changed what and when. 

Pipelines: Before DevOps Center, Salesforce did not have a way to define the pipeline of development environments. But now teams can build customized pipelines with their preferred method of enabling changes. 

Implement changes: Once you are content with the changes, the DevOps Center provides a convenient way to view your whole development pipeline and bundle and relocate changes from one phase to another without using code.  

Best Practices for DevOps in Salesforce

As enterprises begin to further facilitate the enterprise app development cycle, conventional methods are not suitable enough to stand out. DevOps delivers a more efficient and agile way of building and deploying applications that guarantee better performance, superior quality, and security. Development is a part of DevOps but it is not capable enough of drawing benefits unless you implement best practices for DevOps in Salesforce. 

Executing End-to-End Automation  

Implementing Automation in deployment and testing releases your team and let them focus on driving performance apart from securing higher productivity. A native DevOps solution built into the Salesforce ecosystem to allow seamless integration, improved security, and better visibility of the release management process which is different in non-native Salesforce apps. 

Using Version Control
When applying DevOps to your Salesforce projects, we are likely to use 100% native version control to handle code files, documentation, other files, and metadata.  It will allow you to track back any changes and issues along with assuring high-quality security. 

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (CI) is one of the DevOps software development best practices.  This helps 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. 

Implementing SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) practices

Seeing more applications prefer to be delivered as a service to provide an experience that is automated and reliable.  Thus, implementing SRE best practices like creating a resilient mindset, automating all the possible tasks, and advancing towards systems from a human outlook. Seeing the bigger picture helps eliminate unnecessary rework, and lower overall costs through resource optimization.

Smaller and Persistent Execution 

Frequent execution is an ideal way to go for the successful implementation of DevOps in Salesforce projects. It offers a low-risk opportunity to leverage DevOps benefits. Additionally, since smaller commits help build the application faster, you must make them as small as possible without interrupting the build or performance to dodge conflicts later.

The need for Salesforce DevOps 

DevOps is now used in salesforce to achieve automated, continuous monitoring and systematic code testing to enhance the overall built quality.  Team members are encouraged to deliver feedback to each other to learn about any early errors and subsequent changes.  This helps in the incorporation of the feedback provided and adjustments implemented.  Due to this, the business holders expect to see a quantifiable business result from the time and effort put into deploying Salesforce DevOps in the company. 

Given the current status and direction of where Salesforce DevOps is going, DevOps service will only grow as it allows the faster release of products and services. Keeping that in mind, it seems like choosing the ideal DevOps solution is going to be a big task. Evon Technologies can help you with that. To foster a complete digital transformation, our software development company in India integrates DevOps, Agile, and the cloud.  We help automate development and operations to provide more value to users while ensuring continuity of service and excellent support. Let's start talking or email your business requirements at  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..