What is Salesforce DevOps?
‘DevOps’ is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and operations (Ops) to help teams build, test, and release software faster and more reliably.
Salesforce DevOps is synonymous with the word in its broadest sense, but it focuses on making sure administrators and developers can implement changes and complete the software development lifecycle as efficiently as possible, with the fewest errors and least amount of disturbance to users.
Deployment is a common and intricate task in the realm of agile. There are several potential reasons why manual intervention fails.
Currently, Salesforce offers several tools for deploying these applications, such as Workbench, CI/CD Pipeline, SalesforceDX, DevOps Center, change sets, and third-party AppExchange solutions.
5 Pillars of Salesforce DevOps
- Version control
- Automation
- Testing
- Rollback
- Culture
Version Control: Keeping track of and evaluating the various iterations of your source code.  Integrate with your favorite hosting provider such as GitHub, to have full visibility into what was changed, why, when, and by whom.
CI/CD Automation: Take full advantage of Continuous Integration & Delivery processes by creating an automated delivery pipeline of all your sandboxes.
Testing: Ensuring unit tests are run frequently and pass code coverage is essential to smooth deployments. Deployment tools can automate this process.
Rollback:  Performed a deployment that hasn’t worked as expected? Simply roll back the changes made to ensure there is minimal disruption to your users.
Culture: Regardless of a team member’s position or responsibilities, everyone needs to be aware of this culture. Having everyone on the same page is beneficial. On the day of deployment, it is not necessary to schedule a lot of meetings to go over who did what? DevOps takes care of everything.
Even with the greatest technologies, success won’t come easily if you don’t have a well-thought-out implementation plan and a team-wide DevOps culture.
Benefits
- Shorter Development Cycles, Faster Innovation
- Reduced Deployment Failures, Rollbacks, and Time to Recover
- Improved Communication and Collaboration
- Increased Efficiencies
- Source Code Management
What is CI/CD?
CI/CD, which stands for continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment, aims to streamline and accelerate the software development lifecycle.
Continuous integration (CI) refers to the practice of automatically and frequently integrating code changes into a shared source code repository. Continuous delivery and/or deployment (CD) is a 2-part process that refers to the integration, testing, and delivery of code changes. Continuous delivery stops short of automatic production deployment, while continuous deployment automatically releases the updates into the production environment.
Taken together, these connected practices are often referred to as a “CI/CD pipeline” and are supported by development and operations teams working together in an agile way with either a DevOps or site reliability engineering (SRE) approach.
Salesforce DevOps Center
DevOps Center free deployment tool developed internally by Salesforce that is finally generally available! It helps teams release technology faster.
It allows you to move changes between Salesforce development environments using features such as visual development pipelines, source control using GitHub, and automatic change tracking for your environments.
The DevOps Center is an overdue replacement for Salesforce Change Sets – the standard, declarative way to move changes between Salesforce environments.
Other DevOps Tools
Native Tools:
Those are the DevOps tools that you can use within Salesforce. These can be Salesforce tools or AppExchanges tools
- Copado: Copado is the only Quality-Driven, Low-Code DevOps and Automated Testing Platform and other Clouds.
- Flosum: The Flosum platform is a complete end-to-end DevOps platform that is highly scalable, reliable, and fully integrated into the platform.
Third-party:
Some other tools are not native to Salesforce. But do all end with DevOps deployment.
- AutoRabit:Â AutoRABIT provides tools to address the varied needs of a DevOps pipeline
- Gearset: Lightning-fast SF release speed. Ultimate ROI. Level up your DevOps process with Gearset. The only DevOps Platform you’ll ever need. Automate & speed up your pipeline for maximum ROI
Custom Build:
You can build your own tool using different CI/CD platforms. Like below:
- Jenkins: Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration software. It is written using the Java programming language. It facilitates real-time testing and reporting on isolated changes in a more massive codebase. You can build your custom pipeline using this tool. Learn more about Salesforce deployment using Jenkins.
- CircleCI: CircleCI makes it easy for developers, admins, and testers to do their work and collaborate in version control. Check Automate development pipelines with CircleCI to learn more.
- Azure DevOps: Check Azure DevOps with Salesforce to learn about it step by step.
- Gitlab Pipelines: Build CI/CD pipeline using Gitlab for Salesforce.
- GitHub Actions:Â DevOps Using GitHub Actions.
Code Scanning Tools:
Three fundamental aspects of Salesforce DevOps have previously been discussed; if you master them, releases will go more smoothly. But as any skilled developer will attest, developing Apex code isn’t exactly simple. Good developers will set themselves apart from others even if they are proficient in Apex writing by making sure standardizations and best practices are followed to produce readable, scalable code with less technical debt.
Teams of developers can automate the laborious task of manually analysing Salesforce code and settings by utilizing code scanning technologies. This guarantees that every team member is adhering to the same set of best practices and coding standards, as well as maintaining a generally aesthetically pleasing Salesforce organization.
Check out CodeScan, Clayton, Quality Clouds, and DigitSec as examples of these tools…
Test Automation Tools:
Achieving 75% code coverage and unit tests are excellent ways to guarantee the security of your deployments, but what about testing the user experience and business processes to make sure they function as intended? Test automation can be useful in this situation.
Test automation tools allow you to conduct scheduled tests, which guarantees that any processes you build into Salesforce—like qualifying leads, moving opportunities forward, or resolving cases—continue to function regardless of system modifications. In addition, make sure that Apex classes haven’t begun to fail by running all of the org’s unit tests.
To learn more about how Test Automation functions in Salesforce, check out  Provar or Copado Robotic Testing .
Summary
Salesforce DevOps represents both a culture and a set of procedures that unite development and operations teams in software development projects. It leverages various tools to implement efficient processes, streamlining deployment activities to prevent unnecessary time wastage. Whether your approach involves a simple or complex Branching/Org strategy, automating deployment ensures seamless feature integration without encountering failures. Incorporate these tools into your team’s learning plan, as they are poised to become increasingly popular in the future.
