Why You Need Salesforce DevOps in 2022

You’ve probably heard the term DevOps either alone or paired with the Salesforce application. But what does it entail, and why does your company need it? Salesforce DevOps keeps you ahead of your competition and keeps your entire team on track. In 2022 and beyond, the more efficiencies and tools built into your process, the better your team can meet customer needs and keep information flowing between your teams.

Let’s pose a common scenario:

Sales comes back from a meeting with a significant client in which the client currently needs more than your company provides. Sales says, “Of course, we can provide a solution.” Management agrees – this will put your company on the leading edge of innovation and add dollars to your bottom line.

Development and Operations agrees that the work can be done. The problem is that they have different approaches.

Operations doesn’t want to mess up their already smoothly running systems. Development has ideas of their own which take time and resources. Misunderstandings and clashes happen between the two agendas.

How do you get those two teams to work together towards a common goal? Enter DevOps.

Defining DevOps

Historically, there have been several ways in which projects can be completed.

The Waterfall Model was a structured method taking the customer requirements, heading off to the development process, testing, and delivery. One step flowed into the next. This was often slow, with extensive integrations, and the customer was only involved at the beginning and the end of the process.

Changes were complex, and feedback on the product was only at the tail end. If something broke, the steps to fix it were cumbersome.

Improvements were made in the Agile Model, where projects were broken into smaller parts and taken through the production lifecycle much quicker. Sprints break down improvements or fixes into smaller time frames, and daily scrums keep the client and developers on the same page. Feedback happens much quicker. Life still wasn’t perfect as no test environment mimicked production, and the developers and operations still ran their parts separately.

DevOps brings both the development team and operations together in harmony. It improves collaboration ad productivity, organizes workflows, and provides feedback. It is a way to combine practices and tools to shorten a development lifecycle and continually deliver high-quality applications.

It often takes the best of the Agile Model but adds features to track and improve processes and performance.

DevOps Phases

DevOps is often depicted like an infinity, showing that each phase transitions to the next, and the process never really ends.

As developers transition through the phases, they use specific tools related to planning, coding, version control, testing, integration, and more. During each phase, the lines of communication are open, feedback is quick, and troubleshooting is instant.

Principles of DevOps

DevOps thrives on three main principles:

1. Flow – Here, we can focus on the flow of information to the client and the flow of ideas and processes through the process life cycle. Anytime there is a stopgap, there is a loss of efficiencies. This affects the communication between different parts of the organization, the confidence of management and your client, and ultimately the bottom line. The easier the process is, the happier everyone in the organization becomes.
2. Feedback – The quicker the feedback, the better the response and the more opportunities to learn. There’s nothing worse than doing a ton of code changes and finding out that you were off-track. A sound DevOps system allows feedback to happen often, whether from the client or between departments.
3. Continuous Improvement – Moving in a forward, positive motion in small or large steps brings everyone closer to the goal. DevOps flow moves immediately into a new plan after the monitor stage without delay.

Why You Need DevOps

As your team and organization grow, you need a system that will grow with your business, help you quickly and efficiently manage more deployments and bug fixes quickly and efficiently, and facilitate communication and responsiveness throughout your process. DevOps is about managing tools and making them work for your process. Each phase of the life cycle process has tools that automate the process, allowing you to have quicker deployments and respond better to feedback.

DevOps also gives your team real-time metrics to measure your success and pinpoint areas to make improvements.

Benefits of DevOps

Integrating a DevOps process can bring exponential benefits for everyone from developers to admins to release managers and admins

• Better communication between developers and operations
• An increased rate of deployment
• Faster time to market
• A large amount of automation tools
• Continuous integration and delivery
• Greater responsiveness to business needs
• The ability to roll out more frequent releases
• Better response to failures
• Allows you to use the data from your customers more effectively
• Allows you to provide value to your customer quicker and faster
• Allows teams to work on separate projects simultaneously

Meaningful Metrics

DevOps is designed to help companies and projects track metrics. Four measurements help track how DevOps is working.

• The time it takes for code to be committed to production
• How often deployments are performed
• The percentage of releases requiring rollbacks or fixed
• MTTR – the amount of time it takes to recover from failures

Organizations can learn a great deal from these metrics and use them to improve their processes in the future. Continuous improvements help the team grow and provide higher quality changes at a father rate. This bodes well with management and, thus, your bottom line when metrics are favorable.

Scalability

One of the DevOps features that you can take advantage of is scalability. If your company is small to medium and just getting started in DevOps, the above features will improve efficiencies exponentially.

The proper DevOps system can grow with your business. If your operations are extensive, DevOps teams can handle large volumes of deployments with thousands of components. Read more about the Scalability of DevOps.

Enter Salesforce

Salesforce has a huge market share of the CRM market and powers many large companies. They specialize in SaaS (Software as a Service). Besides having an excellent reputation among those in the IT world, Salesforce makes the development and integration process quicker and easier.

Salesforce DevOps

Salesforce manages your infrastructure as code, while your team uses tools to manage releases, track org changes, perform code review and testing, and backup the system. The objective is to automate anything manually.

Salesforce’s advantage for companies is managing a large portion of your infrastructure, such as servers, storage, and networking. This allows you to focus more on software development, automated testing, and customer satisfaction.

This results in:

• Increased deployments in a shorter amount of time
• The ability to respond to market trends and customer needs
• The ability to use configuration management tools to write code
• Better source control with the ability to track changes with details
• Better processes that will enable your team to monitor, measure, and improve coding and operations
• Environments that are in sync
• Fewer change failures
• Faster recovery times

Unblocked Constraints

One thing that Salesforce DevOps thrives in is unblocking constraints. The theory of constraints states that when something is amiss, there is one constraint somewhere in the system that is blocking the rest; find this constraint, and you can move forward.

Of course, there might be another constraint to work on, but working on them one by one will eventually clear the line. Salesforce DevOps practices make it easier and quicker to clear constraints.

DevOps and Monitoring Tools

Salesforce DevOps tools allow your team to spend less time on heavy coding and more time utilizing tools that accomplish the same thing.

Version Control

A critical way of managing and monitoring this work is through Version control.  One way is through a tool called Git or Github, which takes a snapshot of the data at specific intervals. If something crashes the system and changes need to be rolled back, the last snapshot can be recovered, and you can start from that point again.

A second way is through Salesforce itself, where an admin can track their own changes.  They can log when they made the changes and why. Instead of rolling back the whole system, the change that caused a problem can be reversed.

Changes can also be tracked by User Story. User stories can track requirements and test results. They can also be deployed one at a time for tighter control over the environments.

Continuous Integration (CI)

The CI CD pipeline combines automation on three levels, integration, delivery, and deployment. When developers work on different projects inside a system, there are risks of overlapping and creating problems. Salesforce DevOps offers tools to merge the changes with CI tools to solve this.

CI Tools are designed to test the changes and see if the changes will break a current process or create a new problem. These tools are also helpful in integrating different sandboxes. Changes can be back promoted onto other platforms, and the changes can be synchronized across teams. That keeps everyone on the same page and the system working in harmony.

Read more about the 8 Principles of Salesforce Continuous Integration and how Flosum handles this concept beautifully.

Continuous Delivery

These changes and synchronizations are great behind the scenes, but customers want to see results. Continuous Delivery (CD) tools roll the changes into production on demand. Salesforce DevOps allows the changes to be made directly into production if desired. It can also organize your team’s delivery pipeline.

Automated deployments can be scheduled for efficient use of time. They are validated and tested, so they don’t break integral components.

User stories are updated as deployments are made, and environments are kept in sync. This satisfies the main DevOps principle of flow – from concept to customer satisfaction.

Continuous Delivery also affects how your environments are in sync. Production and the sandbox snapshots slowly drift apart in their data and features. Developers make changes to the sandbox, and production is updated with data by users (or by changes done on the fly). Once deployment is made, or at periodic times, it makes sense to refresh the database to ensure everyone is back on the same page.

Ready to Move to Salesforce DevOps?

DevOps is an excellent practice for any organization to get everyone talking to each other about what they are doing. Salesforce DevOps brings these groups together in an organized fashion. Using tools, teams can keep track of what’s happening in their own area and how it affects other teams. Customers can see results quicker and provide feedback, which keeps them coming back.

Salesforce DevOps can be used in any industry where change and automation are desired. A case in point is the healthcare industry, where DevOps revolutionizes how patient records are kept and enables healthcare professionals to deliver quality service. See How DevOps in the Salesforce Health Cloud Accelerates Digital Transformation.

Flosum Solves Challenges

When integrating a new system like Salesforce DevOps, you might run into some challenges before all features run smoothly. Version control and adopting a new way of thinking are at the top of the list, but there may be unique scenarios where Flosum can help.

For a DevOps solution inside Salesforce that integrations wonderfully with GIT, Jira, Azure DevOps, Selenium, and countless other tools, check out Flosum’s solution. It combines version control, requirements management testing, and deployments in one place where Admins and Developers can work together to create flawless executions.