Companies have had to accelerate their business and evolve their Salesforce DevOps strategies in response to the pandemic. Every industry is meeting with increasingly complex workflows and customer needs.
What continues to be two major focus areas in Salesforce DevOps are - productivity and compliance. But many companies - whether early in their Salesforce DevOps journey or further along - are struggling to improve their efficiency and auditing capabilities.
Challenge is that in Salesforce DevOps, your team’s ability to produce faster without compromising quality and security is what steers the ship. It’s the benchmark organizations use to identify project success ratios, analyze software delivery, team performance, and figure out the issues in their existing workflow.
Without that speed and quality and security posture, you’re stuck with inefficient workflows and systems in silos - generally not a great route to repeated success.
To enhance productivity and compliance, organizations are increasingly investing in AI, process innovation, risk management systems, recovery solutions, and end-to-end Salesforce DevOps automation like Opsera.
To help you get ahead, we’re sharing the top challenges organizations face when it comes to Salesforce DevOps and how to solve them with effective processes and tools in place - insights drawn straight from industry leaders.
Salesforce teams are taking on higher volumes of work with more dynamic needs, more responsibility, and more competition for business success. But as flexible and efficient they are, they’re still struggling to keep up. Too many teams have bloated processes that lead to lost time and energy. This directly impacts the release velocity, productivity, quality and security of the software.
To put it in context: here are the top four challenges in Salesforce DevOps.
IT teams are inundated and don’t have the capacity to keep up with rapidly dynamic demands for custom applications. Especially, when they’re not armed with the right applications and systems in place to support their internal functions.
Even with effective DevOps in place, the release velocity is often slower than expected because of its complexity. As a result, maximizing productivity amid rising business complexity and needs is a major challenge.
As your IT team’s digital toolbox continues to expand, they need to perform a host of manual, repetitive tasks. For instance, developers need to build their toolchain. This includes a range of manual sub-tasks: selecting the right tools and plug-ins, integrations, licensing and versioning.
High volume manual tasks slow down development and lead to longer release times. Also, your software is more prone to errors and issues. Lack of automation extends far beyond missed milestones, release timelines, or even failed launches – impacting the organization at large.
Salesforce DevOps teams work in complex environments that consist of various tools for source code management, release management, ITSM, collaboration, security, quality, visibility, and business apps. And managing a complex Salesforce org can be a daunting task.
Salesforce release management challenges include unexpected Sandbox refreshes, moving metadata between multiple environments, managing different Salesforce account types, Salesforce API version skew, and handling large numbers of metadata assets. Native tools like Change Sets, Force.com IDE, and ANT require a lot of time and aren’t the best choice to scale.
Without proper access management in place, you run the risk of users having inappropriate access, which may lead to unauthorized activities. This can severely disrupt your business operations and even incur financial loss. Since it also impacts the accuracy of your financial statements, auditors will certainly test your access controls.
Moreover, it’s crucial to have evidence at the right time for your auditors. Organizations that handle IAM concerns like one-off projects often face a ton of barriers not only to get their data right, but contextualize it for auditors.
According to our findings, organizations spend almost 90% of their time providing evidence for compliance in Salesforce DevOps.
When managed right, Salesforce DevOps allows companies to build better products, transform internal business processes, and produce value for customers. However, bloated systems and an unorganized structure in place can lead to a Salesforce org misaligned with end-user needs and expectations.
Here are some proven tips to ensure productivity and compliance in your Salesforce DevOps journey:
When it comes to answering, “Why do most Salesforce DevOps processes have a lack of productivity and compliance?”, many of the reasons can be traced back to poor mindset and tools. These are crucial parts of the software development lifecycle.
Of course, you might have DevOps tools, processes, and systems in your org, but is there a radical shift in mindset among team members? Do they have transparency in the pipeline? Do they have tools that make their work easier and let them handle complex projects seamlessly?
These are some critical questions you should ask of your Salesforce org. Having the right mindset of security along with a powerful arsenal of tools can make all the difference to your release velocity, security, and quality.
One way to do this is to adopt a tool that offers true DevOps processes and makes it easier for teams to transition to the shift-left mindset. Having a platform like Opsera enables DevOps teams to build the software faster by leveraging automation.
Opsera customers report 60-75% faster production deployment by automating their manual CI/CD tasks.
So, teams aren’t constantly bogged down by slow, inefficient manual processes. This also means that Salesforce DevOps teams can accelerate releases or milestones while focusing on building better and larger goals.
Read: How to solve merge conflicts in Salesforce
Using no-code platforms is quickly becoming the de facto methodology for quickly delivering applications in a Salesforce DevOps environment. In the early days, developers could simply write code, choose a handful of tools and build a pipeline.
However, with layers of tools, stacks, integrations, environments, and hundreds of pipelines, it’s become impossible to maintain observability throughout all the stages of the development.
Data suggests that up to 40% of a developer’s time is spent building, integrating, and maintaining tools and connections for pipelines.
Gartner predicts that by 2024, 65% of all applications will use some form of low- code or no-code application development. Moreover, low-code/no-code solutions have the potential to reduce the development time by 90%. So, it’s a no-brainer why more and more organizations are inclining towards no-code development platforms like Opsera.
A white-box orchestration platform, Opsera helps you build pipelines in a no-code fashion, with zero learning curve. So, your Salesforce DevOps team can instantly start building the software, without worrying about learning the ropes of various tools, integrations, and pipeline building activities.
Organizations that use Opsera report a 40% reduction in manual CI/CD steps.
Low-code pipelines help you build your process and overlay quality and security: static code analysis, dynamic code analysis, threat vulnerability mgmt, password vault, unit testing, integration testing, performance testing, and more.
Different teams use different tools to collect their data and share their information with others. This leads to data fragmentation, and often teams duplicate work instead of making progress.
It’s important to synthesize information from multiple sources, channels, tools, and platforms to make critical decisions faster. This is where a centralized platform comes in.
From a Salesforce DevOps perspective, it’s important to adopt software that you can extend across all of your application and infrastructure stack. Think of it as the hub of a wheel - it connects different tools and sources of information to help teams make better and faster decisions.
The benefits of a unified platform like Opsera go beyond the direct operational needs of a Salesforce DevOps team - a unified platform is also vital for productivity and compliance. Especially in a remote, asynchronous environment, having a tool that acts as a single source of truth (SSoT) streamlines processes and keeps teams updated.
Industry leaders also say that having a consistent tool set for your IT teams is a recipe for long-term success. Without the right data accessible at the right time, it’s hard for teams to present evidence for auditors.
With Opsera, you get aggregated software delivery analytics across your CI/CD process into a single and unified dashboard. Insights from tools like Jeniks, Gitlab, JMeter, Sonar, and more help teams understand the source of data quickly. Contextualized logs in Opsera enable teams to diagnose any failures - including searching by build number - so they can troubleshoot issues faster.
Ever go back to pull change logs, only to see that you don’t have access to it? Not having proper access management or information about why certain changes were made doesn’t make for a very transparent development workflow.
Companies that have streamlined development processes including visibility of project progress and data, ongoing risk management, quality and security posture, and measurement of various KPIs and metrics, more consistently meet and surpass their goals.
Companies that use Opsera report 50% productivity ($) savings.
Harvard Business Review defines transparency broadly, as “the degree to which information flows freely within an organization, among managers and employees, and outward to stakeholders.” At Opsera, we define transparency as “making all information, tools, KPIs, roadmaps, and challenges readily accessible to relevant team members.”
Opsera natively integrates with Salesforce DevOps tools, and it offers granularity of visibility to everyone in your team. With 100+ KPIs and metrics across different dimensions: planning, pipeline, quality, security, and operations, you can increase release velocity without the expense of your quality and security posture.
Finding an enabler who can help you throughout your Salesforce DevOps journey is critical to not only your project success, but organizational milestones and goals. Or else, you constantly need your DevOps engineers, quality analysts, and security experts to learn the ropes of new tools and invest time into manual activities - that can otherwise easily be automated.
Especially when it comes to productivity and compliance - two crucial aspects of Salesforce DevOps - you need a modern orchestration platform.
Opsera is an easy-to-use white-box orchestration platform that gives you the freedom to self-provision or integrate any CI/CD tool and build no-code pipelines within a few clicks. There’s nothing more practical, scalable, and transparent than a software like Opsera that helps you succeed in a remote, asynchronous environment without additional stress.
With features like drag-and-drop pipeline workflows, backup and recovery options, unified data, contextualized logs, and more, Opsera gives you the autonomy to release on demand. It ensures that your team truly follows the CI/CD mindset by enabling continuous integration and continuous delivery in an automated manner.
To learn more about how Opsera can help you enhance your Salesforce DevOps productivity and compliance, book a demo.
