Are your deployments DevOps ready?

Everyone’s talking about how DevOps can take the pain out of Salesforce deployments and supercharge your release pipelines. Many teams using change sets spend hours — or even days — on each deployment, limiting their release cadence.

It might seem like a no-brainer to move towards DevOps, but there are some fundamental building blocks that need to be in place before a DevOps process can be successfully adopted. Deployments are a key part of this.

Teams that successfully move to a DevOps process, and achieve DevOps maturity, tend to have deployments that are both fast and reliably successful. It’s key to evaluate your own deployments before you begin your journey to reduce the likelihood of issues down the line and set yourself up for a successful transition to DevOps.

Deployment speed

DevOps teams are encouraged to release small, fast, and often. If you’re one of those teams that dreads release days, it’s clear this isn’t an overnight shift! Team culture and ways of working play a big part in this —if you are used to long periods of development followed by large releases in a single burst, the DevOps transition will need to be a gradual process that's taken in realistic steps. Splitting development projects into smaller segments and releasing in stages is a great first step to DevOps readiness.

Release reliability

Along with deployments happening more regularly, you also need to consider the success of those deployments. It’s no good releasing more regularly if your team then spends even more time troubleshooting those releases!

Whilst unreliable deployments won’t necessarily stop you from adopting DevOps, you are likely to run into issues as you adopt more elements of a DevOps process. For example, CI/CD tooling can be very helpful to automate high frequency deployments. However, if your deployments are error-prone then automation will slow you down overall, because you’ll start hitting errors quickly and repeatedly.

Common deployment issues

There are a number of common issues that slow deployments down and make them less reliable — anything from ambiguous errors to work being overwritten or even compliance requirements. Many of these issues can be addressed by third-party platforms and solutions, and it’s important to consider the specific problems faced by your team when evaluating which tool will work for you.

Prepare your deployments for DevOps

Getting your deployments fast and reliable is the best foundation for a smooth transition to DevOps, but remember that speed isn’t everything — the most successful teams make improvements to their processes gradually, rather than trying to adopt DevOps in one go!

Take our free DevOps Launchpad course, Get your deployments DevOps ready for detailed guidance on how to set yourself up for a successful Salesforce DevOps journey.