Development using Salesforce involved changing metadata, managing configurations, and releasing them. This differs from conventional software development as it does not include much of code writing. Due to this diversity, development using Salesforce mostly benefit from the quick resolution of the problems and availability of rapid feedback.
Going a step ahead, Salesforce DevOps helps the users to instigate an ongoing loop of feedback from the customers, which can, in turn, improve the quality of our output in terms of a functional application and to enhance agility and responsiveness.
Using DevOps for Application Development
As we know, agile and lean developmental methodologies are the core of the DevOps paradigm. All these will let the business developers deliver the applications quickly and use advanced practices like continuous integration, quick and ongoing delivery, and continuous deployment.
A standard Salesforce DevOps application development involves:
- Effective collaboration
- Better communication
Salesforce development using DevOps can transform the whole way as to how the organizational teams are working. This is done by facilitating a complete cultural and performance shift. DevOps can break down the usual silos among the operational and developmental teams, individual users, stakeholders, and others involved. This approach will help enhance a business’s ability to quickly deliver software applications and give the organization a competitive edge. Let us explore some of the key benefits in further detail.
Automation of the Deployment Pipeline
Automating Salesforce deployment will also promote metadata code and seamlessly change the configuration in the Salesforce developmental environment in some clicks. These solutions used to automate the deployment process will improve the development team’s productivity and operational team’s efficiency to deliver applications with more stability and quality.
Quicker Feedback Loops
As we discussed above, SF DevOps can ensure agile best practices to implement an ongoing feedback loop, which will help improve the operational stability and overall quality of the software application based on changing customer needs and feedback. It can also help development teams to speed up feedback loops for delivered applications too.
More Frequent Releases
Salesforce DevOps will also let the development teams have quicker released even for a small set of additional features or enhancements. These frequent releases will help deliver better services to the end-users. This is so critical in collecting customer feedback and using those to enhance your application performance. SF DevOps offers many tools to provide technology to support enterprises to improve release frequency and quality.
Shift Left
The DevOps success in development relies mainly on the significant parts of Salesforce development as testing during the beginning, called ‘Shift left.’ This is a standard practice with which development teams nowadays test software applications that were built earlier instead of testing only at the end. This practice will help reduce time delays between two releases. This will help prevent the problem at the first point rather than detection at a later point.
DevOps Essentials for Admins
As we discussed above, DevOps global community has now become a gathering place of the much needed and sophisticated developmental ideas and practices. Developmental teams are increasingly adopting these practices.
Understanding DevOps Tools
We can say that DevOps is the process of moving from the Dev to actual production. For this, it is crucial to consider the advantages of making any changes directly during production to know more info: Eric J Dalius.The real need is to get quick access to the dev environment and capture the changes live from that environment to send through deployment and testing. DevOp tools make it very much possible.
The expert comment that the DevOps tools are less necessary than the cultural shift it can invoke. What counts is that everyone whose work will impact the production organization will be able to collaborate on conventional systems efficiently. They can have a shared responsibility for enabling innovations and reduce any confusion or risks.
Understanding Version Control Feature
From the above, accessing the development environment means using shared Dev sandbox. It means running the commands to clone a scratch org or sandbox, which is short-lived. As soon as you start working in the development environment, you may understand why developers make a fuss about it.
In a standard development environment, making changes like using the App Builder or creating the files is something developers are good at. So, changing with a need to capture all your changes into the version control may initially seem to be an overhead. However, considering the time you spend to write codes, it is mostly beneficial to get your configurations as XML to track or compare your work at any point quickly.
Reducing the Gap Among Developers and Non-Developers
For ages now, there is a mystique halo around programming. The developers enjoy this mystery around them and the exclusivity of what they are doing, alienated from the rest of the crowd. However, like anything else, writing application code is simply writing. You can understand the code editors just as text editors and the programming codes as another language.
The actual gap between the coders and non-coders is just like the gap between someone who knows a specific language and others who do not know it. You may only think of getting comfortable with the basic code literacy, and things will change.
Being Salesforce DevOps admin, you may have to face frequent deployment errors. This may be at a larger rate if you work with the change sets. You may also have to face the Git merge conflicts, but for most of the metadata types, these are so easy to resolve.
You may use a code editor like VS Code to do this. However, merging the conflicts for various Profiles and other metadata types may be awkward. Doing it correctly will help you to understand why Salesforce is encouraging the use of the Permission Sets.
The actual point in adopting Salesforce DevOps is to bring developers, admins, and operational teams together on a common platform to ensure the only negligible risk of impacting the production users. This way of working on a standard delivery pipeline will give you more reasons to succeed by ensuring that you will approach the production with more confidence, build together, and speed up the delivery.
