February 24, 2021
Why You Need A Low Code Salesforce Release Management Strategy

Why You Need A Low Code Salesforce Release Management Strategy

Flosum continues Salesforce’s legacy of low code while expanding capabilities in Salesforce release management

Here is an easy question: Who develops Salesforce applications? The answer, of course, is developers. However, the reality is that low code development revolution is altering that reality and simplifying the development process.

Gartner predicts that by 2024, low code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity. As the use of automation soars and CIOs increasingly turn to tools to create applications quickly without the sweat of writing and debugging lines of code, low code becomes a high priority. 92% of IT leaders seek low code solutions at their organizations as it improves the time to market and reduces the technical complexities, thus allowing for faster digital transformation.

Salesforce has made application development accessible to everyone and in the context of Salesforce release management, considered the most difficult aspect of Salesforce, a low code solution that builds on the legacy of Salesforce’s ‘Click not Code’ approach and expands those capabilities in release management will help abstract and automate every step of the ALM to expedite rapid delivery of a variety of solutions

Every day, in the face of mounting challenges in Salesforce app delivery such as developer shortages, and skill set challenges, Salesforce admins and citizen developers are managing more and more low code applications which alleviates the usual heavy lifting that comes with release management and deployment. This allows businesses to achieve faster time to market of new tools and features with the ‘Click not Code’ approach rather than writing code to realize business agility and efficiency. This blog post highlights common Salesforce release management pain points and how low code release management holds the key to improve workflow and collaboration.

Common Salesforce Release Management Challenges

The goal of release management is to help you release with confidence and solve a bunch of common release management pain points.

  • Changes getting overwritten

Given that different development teams are working in parallel, it is not uncommon to have frequent changes or even accidental overwrites to your orgs. Over time with changes in requirements, the system may become fragile and changes take longer. But most often there is no time allocated to clean bad codes. Thus, a major challenge lies in managing and tracking as well as ensuring the rollback of changes in the Salesforce environment.

  • Bugs getting into production

According to a study by Cluster HQ, 43% of developers spend up to 25% of their time debugging production app errors. It takes longer to find and fix bugs and therefore to overcome the mismatch that occurs between different data sets in production vs. the sandbox testing environment, salesforce developers have to often manually replicate data to sandbox testing environments. This is cumbersome and involves spending quality time on a complex process and because of this tends skipped by most developers.

  • Multiple release environments

The metadata usually moves across multiple environments until it is finally deployed in production. The major challenge involves the maintenance of these various environments as well as managing the various pre and post-migration activities at each stage of the sandbox.

Present Release Management Approach

Presently, the level of release management is determined by the risk appetite of your business as well as the size and complexity of your Salesforce project. Broadly, organizations can be spread across a continuum, from businesses that don’t feel the need to implement release management at one end to those organizations that count release management critical for their Salesforce projects:

  • Scenario 1: Business Do Not Consider Release Management Appropriate

In cases when there is less risk of interruption to the business continuity businesses and organizations ignore release management. This is primarily because it is assumed that since the changes can be quickly deployed without much effort, leveraging release management for the simple changes will not deliver much value.

  • Scenarios 2: Release Management is Preferred to manage version control

Organizations prefer release management when the complexity of the Salesforce project grows or when working with multiple development environments. Release management allows organizations to track changes, create an audit trail as well as roll back changes.

  • Scenario 3: Release Management is Critical to meet regulatory requirements

Organizations when developing complex applications requiring multiple developments and testing environments consider release management critical. In such cases, since the project requires several teams working simultaneously on different development cycles, as well as several rounds of regression testing, release management becomes essential to ensure a structured approach for successful deployment. A clear release management framework also helps organizations meet their legal obligation to meet certain regulatory requirements.

Thankfully, there is a solution: low-code release management to democratize powerful DevOps solutions for all!

Do More With Less Code!

A low code release management solution helps you design the right sandboxes that cater to various needs in the organization in areas of development, training, and testing so that even salesforce admins and citizen developers take part in the Release Management process, with no reason to fail.

An all-in-one solution for requirements management, version control, deployments, and regression testing, Flosum leverages Salesforce’s familiar UI for all actions (remove actions, workflows, etc.). It continues Salesforce’s legacy of low code while expanding capabilities in release management to simplify Salesforce DevOps.

Ready to discover how Flosum delivers more value than any other Salesforce DevOps solution?

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