How DevOps improves your Salesforce release management process

Salesforce orgs can be hugely complex, needing a skilled team of admins, developers and release managers to keep them on track. When developing custom Salesforce features, it can be difficult to balance demands and resources within your team, hit release targets, and maintain a positive and productive culture — but DevOps can help. Changing your approach to releases can be daunting, but there are good reasons for you and your team to adopt DevOps practices.

Improve collaboration

Whether you’re a team of two or twenty, it’s vital to work well together. Managing separate admin and developer workflows, coordinating changes and keeping environments in sync were just some of the challenges reported in Gearset’s State of Salesforce DevOps survey, which investigated the processes of over 1000 Salesforce teams. Collaboration is at the heart of DevOps, and a streamlined DevOps process empowers your teams to share responsibilities and break down silos to work together seamlessly and efficiently.

Mitigate release risk

It’s every release manager’s worst nightmare: your team spends weeks getting a project ready for deployment, before being plagued by a multitude of conflicts, which you then have to spend hours — or even days — resolving. A well-oiled Salesforce DevOps process will identify any issues early on, and smaller releases allow bugs to be ironed out as they come up, rather than culminating in chaos on a single monthly release day! Effective version control minimizes the risk of corrupting, overwriting, or deleting large sections of your org in error, giving you and your team confidence in their deployment reliability.

Simplify resource planning

Adopting DevOps can help you move towards smaller, faster releases, which can reduce pressure on other teams within the business. Rather than working on huge, lengthy projects, with stressful make-or-break release deadlines, a more agile approach allows you to plan for the release of specific features and modifications in more manageable chunks. Rather than tying up individuals or teams for weeks on one project, each can ship their features and get started on the next, all whilst keeping each other in the loop.

Deliver value faster

All this adds up to one key advantage of adopting Salesforce DevOps: getting value into the hands of your users and customers, faster. With less time spent on process management, teams have more time for valuable development work. It’s easier to run multiple projects at the same time, incorporate the feedback that matters, and increase the speed and success rate of your deployments.

Ready to take your team to the next level?

Let us help you! No matter how large or small your team, DevOps Launchpad is a great place to align your approach. Our free Salesforce DevOps Fundamentals certificate provides a solid foundation of DevOps knowledge that you can put into practice right away. It will equip your team with the common language and understanding which is so crucial to adopting and optimizing DevOps processes.

Are you ready to become a DevOps pro, test your knowledge, or prove your expertise? Log in to your account, or join DevOps Launchpad today to level up your learning!