DevOps revolves around tools, processes, and methods of work for software application development. Fortunately, embracing DevOps for Salesforce does not mean you should make any changes to how your team functions or carries out big changes all at once. What your developer team generally does falls under the Salesforce DevOps process. They move towards a software development environment that is more agile, faster, and automated.
What are the major components of the Salesforce DevOps Process?
Any Salesforce process in a company will incorporate the following four major components
1. Version control for more reliable collaboration
When it comes to the core of any modern DevOps process, the Git based version control system is its source control. This permits the team to track all the changes made so that you can review your contributions easily. It also allows multiple contributors to work on similar features at a particular time. The individual team of developers contributes to the new work within the Git branches that later are merged into the master branch that contains the stable and latest version of their projects after this work has been reviewed.
There are endless advantages and reasons as to why you should use a version control system like Git. It helps you to-
- Reduce risks and avert expensive errors by using the metadata in Git as the source for your org instead of the production org
- Track and annotate the development work with a full history of every change your team has made to the organization. This helps you in debugging and auditing.
- Collaborate with several members of the team working the same org without overwriting the work of one another
- You can release the work safely and reliably first by testing the changes until you are satisfied till they are ideal for a purpose.
3. CI/CD for continual business value
CI or continuous integration automates the processes of testing and validating the changes made to the application. It is built of a workflow that is Git based. CI ensures that the changes can be successfully deployed. Continuous delivery or CD revolves around releasing small and frequent changes to the end-user through an automated process.
It reduces the risks that are linked with larger releases. If you take both CI and CD together, you will find that the pain and the risks of manual deployment are eliminated to several environments and production. The above promotes an incremental and iterative approach to software development. You have the target to contribute to small changes frequently and get immediate feedback from the developer team and the end-users.
When you use CI/CD in the process to execute automated and small releases, you can.
- Lessen manual mistakes that result in problems with releases
- Reduces the risks of individual releases as the process gradually become more reliable
- Lessens the downtime by rolling back these errors safely along with changes that are not wanted
- It makes the feedback loop tighter and allows the end-user to drive the development process
- Helps to work on several projects simultaneously and changes the direction as per the feedback received without loss of the existing work
- You can release business value created faster to the end-user.
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3. Automated testing for clean and error-free codes
In software application development, testing is a crucial part of the process. Salesforce ensures developers test at least 75 percent of new codes deployed to the production org. The tests that a business needs to write should be useful and meaningful if you want to ensure your team can easily review and build reliable code in the future. Automation helps a business test these changes before merging into the production org or any other environment.
With Salesforce DevOps tools, you can create an agile setup for the process. You can populate development and testing environments with the data from production. This helps you to check how the code works with the actual data. The real data comes in all forms that you might not have even thought about when you began to write the code.
Automated testing permits you to –
- Save both time and effort by ensuring that your changes function properly before deployment
- Does not break the existing code when new and existing code is continuously being tested
- Ensure you develop the precise features that the business requires
- Boosts the quality of the development work by reducing critical errors and bugs. It frees your developer team to work on other innovative new features for the application.
4. Backup for complete and swift disaster recovery
A backup for your organizational and customer data is crucial just in case disaster strikes. This can be in the form of data corruption because of integration by a third party, a disgruntled employee with the intention to harm your business, data loss that might take place by accident, or even an outage on the Salesforce platform. Backup solutions are ideal for your business as you can restore the data from them.
However, you need to keep in mind the relationship between the structure of your production org (the metadata where your data has been stored) and the data. Both require continual backups. Teams with processes and tools in place for monitoring and rolling back changes to their business data and metadata are in a position to restore the data hierarchies that are complex to their orgs quickly before the damage is caused. In short, a small backup solution allows you to.
- Use the deployment process to restore both the metadata and data
- Deploy the data that you have taken a back up of to the sandbox environment for tests
- Monitor the data of the org for changes or any deletion with the monitoring of metadata
- Mask or delete records so that they comply with all the regulations about data protection.
When it comes to DevOps processes, Salesforce developers do not embrace all the above practices quickly. Instead, they take time, and the gradual adoption of them slowly brings in rewards when it comes to customer satisfaction, business value, and greater ROI for the organization.
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