Overcoming DevOps adoption challenges

With General Availability of DevOps Center, DevOps continues to take the Salesforce world by storm. Many Salesforce teams have been enjoying the benefits of DevOps for some time, but DevOps Center shows that DevOps has become the de facto approach to Salesforce development across the ecosystem. But it can be daunting to change the way your team works, so in this post we take a look at some of the key challenges facing Salesforce teams looking to adopt DevOps, and how you can avoid these common pitfalls.

Not prioritizing culture

DevOps can transform your release process, but if your team aren’t all on the same page it can slow you down rather than speed you up. Culture is crucial to successful Salesforce DevOps adoption – where everyone in the team understands and is committed to the process. This is true whether an individual’s role involves making minor changes to a page layout, more complex development, or managing an entire Salesforce team.

A well-oiled DevOps process enables more people to have involvement at the right stages of the release process, which ultimately leads to better collaboration and faster delivery of value to end users. Set yourself and your team up for success – build confidence in DevOps, work through any issues or concerns together, and commit to continually expanding your knowledge as a team. Our Salesforce DevOps Fundamentals Certificate is a great place to start to ensure you have a solid foundation to build upon!

Not having a clear vision

Many organizations recognize the benefits of DevOps, but fail to invest enough time in properly planning its implementation. Issues that many teams face are conflicts between different sets of tools or platforms, environments which aren’t standardized, or manual processes that could result in bottlenecks – problems that could be easily solved with effective planning and communication within and between teams.

Successfully adopting DevOps requires you to look at every element of your release pipeline, both within and across cross-functional teams. It’s important to ensure that those involved in making key decisions have all the information they need and are in agreement about how to proceed, before teams are tasked with implementing changes or a new approach. When everyone understands the end goal, and the plan to get there, you’re much more likely to succeed.

Moving too fast

One of the main benefits of adopting DevOps is that it helps teams do more, faster. With this in mind, a lot of teams fall into the trap of trying to implement everything all at once in order to get the maximum benefit as soon as possible. Unfortunately, this is a sure-fire way to fail.

For example, if you try to fully automate your release processes before you have reliable, successful deployments, your team will be spending a lot of their valuable time manually fixing bugs and errors. The most successful DevOps teams focus on implementing small changes bit by bit, building understanding and confidence across the team to a fully functioning end-to-end DevOps pipeline. DevOps is all about incremental improvements, so even once you’ve got a solid process up and running, there’s always room to check and see what you can optimize.

Not thinking about the bigger picture

According to the State of Salesforce DevOps 2026 report, teams with high adoption across the full DevOps lifecycle are four times more likely to feel extremely confident on release day, and they outperform lower-adoption teams on every delivery metric measured in the report — bug rate, fix time, and time to restore service. The lifecycle provides a robust framework for teams building on Salesforce, from initial planning right through to monitoring and improving what's live. Take the Salesforce DevOps Lifecycle course on DevOps Launchpad to find out more about the lifecycle, and how your team could use it to improve your processes.

Your path to Salesforce DevOps success

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