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Improve Your Salesforce DevOps Efficiency with these 7 tips

Prasana Lakshmi
Prasana Lakshmi
Published on
March 1, 2023

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Salesforce DevOps has made its way into discussion rooms, meetings, events and media in the past few years marking its place. It’s a game changer for DevOps teams. But have you ever wondered why salesforce devops adoption is easy, but effectively running it isn’t?

Well, the answer boils down to this; Devops tools are easy to use. But “easy” also means completing tasks more quickly and creating complex solutions in a shorter amount of time, without using adequate strategy.

The responsibility of DevOps engineers has grown immensely in recent times, as the software delivery process performance reflects how your company performs. But fret not! In this blog, I intend to break down a few tips/techniques, which could improve your organization's DevOps efficiency. 

First up, ask yourself these questions and we will dive into the answers for them.

  1. How do you measure and visualize your DevOps process?
  2. How do you strategize the DevOps approach?
  3. How do you measure the success of your Salesforce delivery process?

Track the right metrics

Reporting DevOps processes are often visually complex, and when unable to design it in a simple fashion, the report is a wasted effort as it provides no actionable insights.  

As DevOps focuses on blurring the line between development and operations teams, enabling greater collaboration, Metrics allows DevOps teams to measure and assess the collaboration and track progress to achieve high-level goals.

Analytical metrics for DevOps helps to make decisions and improve quality. Metrics can be created to review each step of the deployment process providing visibility that allows to easily drill down on a pipeline that’s been running for a long time or has failed. 

Let’s look at a few illustrations of how Opsera displays these powerful metrics.

Build & Deployment Statistics
Salesforce Deployment Duration by Stage
Code Smells

Key Takeaways from Opsera’s Insights:

  • Birds eye view of the deployment time spent on Profile related packages, provides a perspective on Profile and Permissions deployment challenges and how Opsera’s profile migration adds value by having separate pipelines for profiles.
  • Component lookup to pull all the deployments per metadata component deployed using salesforce. This enables the project teams to handle common components across multiple pipelines and predict future conflicts and failures.
  • Quality gate reports to continuously running quality gates provides a real time overview of the code vulnerabilities and opsera has ready to use insights built in. 

Give visibility to Leaders and Developers

Devops Visibility within teams defines how work is being carried out in the product and removes any bottlenecks in the process. Whereas, a poor visibility within internal teams and the administration can lead to misalignment in delivery goals. 

An easy solution is to keep the leads and developers in the loop by providing them information on technical challenges and team processes. This includes providing them with deployment metrics based on historical data, planning and decision making for large programs from a deployment perspective, creating efficient planning for on time delivery, etc. 

Keep an eye on the performance of your releases

Measuring performance of releases equals assessing impact on the changes. The better your DevOps process, the easier it is to get the code to production. 

An interface like Opsera with tools for centralized management and troubleshooting helps developers to plan and coordinate deployments across multiple teams and environments. Opsera as a platform enables version control based deployment options which is inline with salesforce recommended best practices for source of truth.

Make testing a routine part of your deployment process

Don’t rush into production without proper deployment testing. Integrated testing detects any underlying issues and prevents them from going to code to production. This saves you time and keeps costly bugs at bay! 

Running quality gates and automated test suites as part of the pipeline creation improves efficiency and reduces regression issues after every deployment. 

Collaborate for successful DevOps

Whether they are 10 or 100 users, everyone needs to be aware of all the collective changes. Continuously merging changes to a repository and maintaining the source of truth is the key for faster and successful deployments. 

Similarly, automated notifications to alert users at each step of the deployment process is a way to keep them informed of all the changes and collaborate when necessary.

Automate your deployment process

Following source of truth as your version control system leads way to developing an automated deployment process. Working with different teams can cause metadata to become fragmented. 

The goal of the single source of truth is to keep project teams informed and coordinated. In order for the organization's personnel to successfully obtain customer insights, data from many sources is combined into a single repository. Any organization can use this technique to acquire marketing and consumer insights to help create a more positive client experience.

Additionally, you can automate pull requests and use PR webhooks which lead to automated deployments to higher environments. 

As an additional read, check out how Opsera solves merge conflicts during Salesforce deployments.

Create a secure integration between development and production environments

Following security standards across the platform with respect to integrations is crucial. It is best to look for platforms who offer out-of-the-box integrations, instead of custom creating integrations and having to deal with the security concerns. 

Opsera follows best security practices set by the industry and is SOC2 type2 compliant. All the Salesforce Metadata transfer while at rest and in transit is encrypted. In addition, all the credentials (Client ID, secret token, etc) are stored in a vault and not exposed to other users.

Additionally, Opsera’s CI/CD Pipelines can:

  • Seamlessly integrate security and quality into your CI/CD pipelines
  • Add approval gates at every step of the pipeline
  • Reduce vulnerabilities and improve collaboration with the right KPIs

With a software like Opsera, you are not only excelling in your deliverables to customers, but also ensuring smooth collaboration within the team! 

These tips can be overwhelming at first, but remember to follow these for effective deployment. If you need more advice, we are just an email away. Write to us, and also check us out at Opsera.io to learn more.

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