5 Best Practices to Implement a Robust Salesforce Deployment Process
We all know Salesforce facilitates continuous innovation at scale, allowing companies to fulfill their rapidly-evolving requirements with high levels of efficacy and achieve excellent growth. The needs of a fast-growing organization are highly dynamic, and this calls for the capability to add new features to its Salesforce system quickly, with minimal interruption to its operations.
Most firms are leveraging DevOps, a paradigm that enables hassle-free collaboration between various teams viz. development, operations, quality assurance and information safety to enhance the abilities of their Salesforce org with little disruption to the functioning of their business. DevOps utilizes automation to shorten development lifecycles in a big way, allowing companies to deal with fast-changing needs efficaciously.
One of the key elements of Salesforce DevOps is Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD). CI is a DevOps process that enables Continuous Deployment (CD); it allows smooth integration of code from different development teams automatically, thereby facilitating a complete release of software. A Salesforce CI involves the following steps.
· Importing revised code into the systems of the development team
· Developing new capabilities of the Salesforce org
· Committing the modifications to a centralized repository
· Enabling smooth recompiling when a new code commit takes place
· Performing unit and integration tests on recompiled code
· Informing the results of the tests to the team, so that they can act and fix defects quickly
Once CI is completed, the DevOps initiative reaches the Continuous Delivery/Continuous Deployment phase. The two procedures are very similar and differ only in one aspect. Here’re the steps that are common to both Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment.
· Verifying the status of the build and resolving issues (if any) before submitting a new piece of code
· Submitting modifications to the repository in a systematic fashion
· Reverifying the build status; if it’s successful, rebasing work systems for configuration
· Testing the build to make sure all newly-added functions work as desired
· Checking in the newly-developed code upon successful completion of build testing
· Finishing CI with the new changes
From this point, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment diverge. In case of the former, deployment of the newly-created features is done manually after getting an approval from the concerned stakeholders. However, in Continuous Deployment, the enhancement release process is fully automated.
Having seen how a Salesforce CI/CD process looks like, let’s now move on to examine 5 best practices to facilitate effective implementation of the process.
5 Proven Practices to Successfully Execute Salesforce CI/CD
You must come up with a good plan for your Salesforce CI/CD initiative based on the goals you wish to achieve. The plan must enable your team to gather requirements seamlessly and utilize them to add new features and develop user stories that can be presented for getting approval from stakeholders. Remember DevOps is all about releasing software in iterations, and ensuring proper collaboration will go a long way in enabling releases without time and cost overruns.
2. Formulate an Effective Environment Strategy
Make sure the creation of your user stories and new features is guided by an effective environment strategy. You must clearly specify the data needs for each stage of the development process, indicate the tasks performed by each member of your team and define access controls for the environments. The environment strategy must be based on your data usage policies and fully adhere to applicable regulatory norms.
3. Set Up Clear Processes to Avoid Confusion
Each developer has his own way of working; when each member of the development team works on his own tasks without proper communication and access to documentation, there is bound to be confusion. So, it is necessary to define parameters that people in your team have to follow throughout the development process in an unambiguous manner. This will help prevent issues, thereby facilitating hassle-free enhancement of your Salesforce org.
4. Facilitate Continuous Testing of High Efficacy
You need to test customized code continuously to make sure it functions as desired. You can complement your manual testing efforts with automated tests to thoroughly verify Salesforce deployments. Many companies use popular testing tools such as Selenium to execute automated tests. However, these tools can be utilized effectively only by skilled developers who are adept at programming, and this can create problems for users with little coding ability. You can overcome this challenge by using low-code tools that allow non-technical users to test the enhancements to your org without hassles.
5. Use a Good Version Controlling System
Using a robust version controlling system plays a critical role in the success of your company’s CI/CD initiative. It allows you to track and manage modifications to code quickly, with minimal effort, thereby allowing you identify issues and eliminate bugs effectively. You can also use the version controlling system to map the value stream to minimize wastage and improve efficiency.
I’d like to conclude by saying proper execution of the CI/CD initiative will allow you to complete your Salesforce DevOps project successfully. The five best practices listed above will go a long way in enabling you to implement the initiative effectively.
Hope you liked this post. How do you use DevOps to enhance your Salesforce org? We’d love to know.