The major aspect of the Salesforce platform, which makes more and more enterprise uses attracted to it is its low-code solutions in enterprise application development. After going through several upgrades and updates, Salesforce offers a robust customizable platform, which can adapt to fast-changing business and market requirements.

Over time, Salesforce and Salesforce DX had done a remarkable job in an innovative declarative development model. Those who can code as well as those who do not will be able to utilize this flexible platform to custom configure their Salesforce development environment. This strong platform also allows companies to choose from a broader set of tools and development programs compared to traditional development.

Solutions SF DevOps offer for development and testing related risks

Let us review some primary risk factors associated with conventional development.

  • Whether all changes made in an online app development process are tested fully?
  • What if it crashes down the Salesforce org?
  • What happens if the changes are overwritten in subsequent releases?
  • What if it does not make it back to the development pipeline?

SF DevOps Solutions: These limitations may exist due to the restrictions as to what changes users can make to production. With the Salesforce security settings and also with the partner packages, you can restrict those and only release managers can make production changes approved. Organizations can set up a pipeline for development-to-production which will ensure proper testing, defect finding, and fixing before deployment.

Now, let us consider some secondary risk factors and SF DevOpsmitigations. Risks are:

  • Whether anything out there to ensure proper collaboration between different teams?
  • What will happen if one team’s work is overridden by another team?
  • What will happen if the expected features are not delivered to end-users?
  • Risk of deployment delays

DevOps solution: By making use of testing automation, source control, and an effective deployment pipeline, the development teams which encounter real-time conflicts during production can instantly resolve those before deployment. On-time testing at the early stages of the development will make sure perfect QA and quality output. Moreover, testing automation will let you scale the Salesforce operations add more resources if needed without tampering with the work quality.

Other things to consider are that SF DevOps enforces usage of appropriate version control systems like Git. These can help manage metadata extracts in order to copy the structure and source of the Salesforce environment. These tools also let proper branching and allow the teams to work at their pace.

A proper SF DevOps practice can help mitigate all the above risks along with improved quality, scalability, and velocity. Usage of the right DevOps practices and tools can also provide greater visibility into the development environment. You may also implement any AppExchange solutions like Gearset, AutoRABIT, and Copado, etc. or create a custom pipeline on your own using tools like GitHub, Jenkins, JIRA, etc.

Benefits of SF DevOps implementation

Traditionally, enterprise development projects follow these three options in organized application development.

  1. They develop software in-house by maintaining a team. This involves a good deal of investment in human resources and technical assets for the development process.
  2. Outsourcing software development to third party consultants if there are no internal IT resources
  3. A part of development is handled in-house, but some parts of it, for example, the QA may be delegated to a third-party services provider.

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In all approaches, there are some significant challenges faced by enterprises as below.

  • A high number of post-release errors even after test engineers conduct various testing modalities like functional, integration, performance, usability, security testing, etc.
  • Configuring appropriate production and testing environments.
  • Lack of trust of users in the quality of the software, which is mostly associated with several post-release errors. As the potential business users may be busy with their other primary tasks, such feedback also comes with significant delays.
  • Delayed updates and fixes. Partially due to the above reason and also as a result of the impaired collaboration between development teams and testing team.
  • Highly time-consuming deployments of technical infrastructure. The system administrators may spend days or even weeks to prepare for new application development, production infrastructure setup, and testing, etc. Misconfigurations may also occur during manual infrastructure preparation.

DevOps comes with a unique set of technologies and practices to deliver stable and thoroughly tested applications, much faster than traditional development operations. Let us explore a few such benefits of DevOps.

  • Enabling ongoing communication between different developmental and allied team

The introduction of DevOps itself is for the effective merger of development-operation procedures. The developers, QA testers, system administrators, and operational team members now work well in sync with each other. Ongoing communication between teams and DevOps practitioners will let delivery of new applications, patches, and updates to production much faster and also thoroughly tested with a negligible number of missed out bugs if any.

  • Lesser failures due to in infrastructure configuration differences

In the case of DevOps, you can have identical work environments across the board for development, QA, and operations teams. This is achieved by delivering infrastructure as code (IaC). As a result of this approach, there will not be any situation where the application works properly while tested in the testing environment but fails in the production environment.

  • Faster infrastructure provisioning

DevOps applies the same IaC approach for faster preparation and delivery of new development infrastructure and for testing production deployment. This infrastructure may exist as a built code, so the developers need not have to wait for systems administrators to provide it when they need new infrastructure for the project in hand.

  • Testing automation

In the CI/CD (continuous integration / continuous delivery approach, continuous testing is also made possible through DevOps’ automation approach. Many specialized testing automation tools are available like Selenium, Tricentis Tosca, and Zephyr, etc. which are custom made to perform different automated tests like a functional test, unit test, integration test, etc. On the detection of bugs, these automation test tools can provide detailed reports also to the DevOps practitioners.

DevOps also ensure reliable and quicker delivery of updates for applications and lesser pos-release errors. Ultimately it can help improve the users’ trust and thereby more effective business administration. In order to achieve these goals, you need to transform your software development and IT infrastructure management in tune with DevOps standards.