DevOps for Salesforce – Star glance on DevOps process and applications to intensify Salesforce performance

Why do you need Salesforce DevOps tools?

Introduction: Complete Guide to Salesforce DevOps in 2022

A widely used platform for software development, Salesforce has acquired its niche among IT service providers. Despite Salesforce's features making application development more convenient, however, while working on huge lines of code, frequent releases, environment handling, large numbers of developer sandboxes, the manual deployment process tends to consume a substantial amount of effort and time.

To aid the development process and be more convenient, automated, easy, and reliable, the DevOps process can be incorporated to yield a better SDLC lifecycle.

DevOps Salesforce:

DevOps is a bridge for developers (salesforce developer) and operations teams to collaborate, enhance and refine the constant delivery process. DevOps implementation can handle frequent releases, provide one step ahead of automation, and minimize security issues and errors.

The method of planning and developing an application might have a gap between vision and business values. DevOps bridges this gap by aligning the process and people by involving pipelines. As per studies, it has been evident that the developers' use of the DevOps deployment tools been highly beneficial along with salesforce backup tools and salesforce dx for better salesforce deployments for automated testing and reviewing salesforce code.

Adopting the Salesforce DevOps tool for projects with thousands of users and multiple developers and software platforms is very conducive. DevOps brings a cultural shift - mindset, processes, and technology - organizations become more collaborative and prioritize work efficiently.

DevOps Tool:

Expedites application redevelopment.

Improves Final business product.

Better support interface for end-users.

Reduces deployments manual efforts and time consumed in manual activities.

Manual Software development method vs. DevOps Method:

Salesforce DevOps tools:

The Salesforce DevOps process allows you to accelerate deployments with minimum hurdles, which leads to a more qualified product in less time.

A well-thought Salesforce DevOps strategy gives you a competitive edge as you can push software out of the door faster, sell more effectively than other companies, and get more value from your inputs.

The features that DevOps applications offer:

1. Impact Analysis
2. Org Synchronization
3. Conflict Resolution
4. Continuous Integration and Automation
5. Peer Review Code
6. Data Backup and Security
7. Change Management
8. Easy Rollbacks Process

It helps managers to:

• Save time and effort for release-related management work
• Take control of the development process better
• To achieve automation of both manual and complex tasks
• Produce higher-quality software
• Takes off the burden of work management schedules

Here are the two most popular Salesforce DevOps tools:

• Flosum -

1. Flosum is an exciting and fantastic release management application for the Salesforce platform. It is a flexible, robust, and easy-to-use solution for release management so that you don’t have to deal with cumbersome changeset and ant script or metadata API managements.
2. Flosum team creates a separate org for your project where all your sandboxes and production org get registered on the Flosum app. Salesforce has tested and reviewed Flosum for security, making it a more reliable DevOps application.
3. It offers a snapshot feature to create a snapshot of the components deployed from one org to another. It is wholly built on the Salesforce platform, and like any other application, we can configure and extend it as per our requirements.
4. The high lighting feature of Flosum is it’s a user-friendly application.

• COPADO–

1. Copado Salesforce package is a well-known, widely being used, end-to-end solution. It incorporates everything from planning, building, testing, and deploying Salesforce changes.
2. COPADO team sets up pipeline management for your project, including all the sandboxes and production org. Pipeline manager architect makes the job easy to track the user stories and sync up the orgs. Also, it helps to cherry-pick the changes and deploy them into- intended org.
3. The COPADO manage package uses a custom object - user story, a metadata container to organize and release changes upstream. DevOps engineers can add the components in this User story and migrate them from one sandbox to another with the help of pipeline architecture.
4. It also helps us manage one or more projects in parallel and decreases the problem resolution time.

Working on a Salesforce project that does not have DevOps tool implementation makes the job quite lengthy for admin, developers, and release managers.

As an admin, we had to create the release packages manually, resolve the conflicts, check the dependencies, resolve them, and maintain the code coverage as per Salesforce standards. Sandbox refresh is another tedious task we had to do with planning and manual work.

Along with that, we had to perform integration and automation of the application to maintain the life cycle. Ongoing back-to-back releases for a live project and handling these manual activities is too much work and could raise the defect rate.

With DevOps implementation in the same project, the complete code migration and software release improved day by day. DevOps applications are built with Salesforce security keeping in mind.

As DevOps has better handling for all the stages, it makes the team's job easy, with fewer efforts and better-quality products for clients.

These elements add value to the final product and a good impression on the client as a service provider.