Benefits of Salesforce DevOps Center
One of the most important benefits of Salesforce DevOps Center is the ability to deploy changes faster and more easily. You can also save time on testing, improve compliance, and reduce the need for hotfixes.
In addition, DevOps Center offers the potential to improve Salesforce development and delivery performance metrics. Plus, it enables admins and developers to collaborate more effectively using a single source of truth. Let’s take a closer look.
Improve Performance for Salesforce Development and Delivery
The DevOps Research and Assessment team (DORA) has identified four key metrics to measure software development and delivery performance. DevOps teams use DORA metrics to gauge their performance and determine whether they’re elite performers, medium performers, or low performers.
DORA metrics include:
- Deployment frequency: The frequency of successful deployments to production.
- Lead time for changes: The time between a change commit and the time that the change is deployable.
- Mean time to recovery: The time between an interruption caused by a system or deployment failure and full recovery.
- Change failure rate: The percentage of changes that lead to failure after deployment.
DevOps Center allows Salesforce teams to improve their DORA metrics. You can deploy changes faster, with more oversight and transparency, and from a single source of truth.
Deploy Changes Faster and More Easily
Salesforce admins and release managers are well acquainted with the frustration of using change sets. Fortunately, the most important Salesforce DevOps Center use case is if you want to deploy metadata changes faster and more easily.
DevOps Center uses a prescribed pipeline that includes distinct phases for development and testing before deploying to production. Instead of using change sets to migrate metadata changes, you click “Pull Changes,” to automatically detect changes in the sandbox. Then you select the changes you want and commit them to the Work Item.
This pushes the metadata to the corresponding feature branch in the Git repository. When you’re ready to promote the change to the next step in the pipeline, you create a review that initiates a pull request in the repository. Here, you can review the changes and, once they’re approved, promote them to the next stage of development in DevOps Center.
By eliminating the need to use change sets, Salesforce has made great strides in making change management faster and easier.
Salesforce admins and release managers are well acquainted with the frustration of using change sets. Fortunately, the most important Salesforce DevOps Center use case is if you want to deploy metadata changes faster and more easily.
DevOps Center uses a prescribed pipeline that includes distinct phases for development and testing before deploying to production. Instead of using change sets to migrate metadata changes, you click “Pull Changes,” to automatically detect changes in the sandbox. Then you select the changes you want and commit them to the Work Item.
This pushes the metadata to the corresponding feature branch in the Git repository. When you’re ready to promote the change to the next step in the pipeline, you create a review that initiates a pull request in the repository. Here, you can review the changes and, once they’re approved, promote them to the next stage of development in DevOps Center.
By eliminating the need to use change sets, Salesforce has made great strides in making change management faster and easier.
Improve Compliance
Once you’ve made changes, DevOps Center pushes them to the Git repository, which functions as a source control system. Your team has the ability to collaborate by means of review comments. If needed, you can make further changes, plus have those reviewed and approved before you promote them to the next stage.
DevOps Center also lets you view, manage, and track changes with the Activity History feature in its modern UI. This feature automatically tracks changes so you don’t have to do it manually anymore.
In the Activity History, you can see a comprehensive history of all key events. For example, you can see synchronizations, work item status changes, commits, approvals, errors and failures, and promotions. Activity History is available on the Pipeline, as well as on each Work Item.
The Activity History offers a record of events plus all associated details for troubleshooting, general visibility, and auditing purposes.
Admins and Developers Can Collaborate Better
Typically, Salesforce admins have taken the backseat regarding the DevOps process because they’re declarative users who use little to no code. With Salesforce DevOps Center, teams now have a robust way to work together using GitHub as the centralized repository.
The great news for admins is that while all changes go through GitHub as source control, deployments can be made declaratively. DevOps Center makes the changes to the code repository behind the scenes. This evens the playing field considerably.
On top of this, DevOps Center enables teams to review and comment on each other’s work in one space. Everyone can see a project’s progress, from the creation of a DevOps Center Work Item with a User Story to deploying changes. This visibility facilitates collaboration between declarative and programmatic users.
A Reduced Need for Hotfixes
Salesforce DevOps Center provides a clear pipeline for developing, testing, and deploying changes. All metadata components are pushed to the Git repository, which functions as a centralized source control. Here, your team can review the changes before you deploy them. With more eyes on what you’ve built, there’s less chance of bugs that require hotfixes.
Additionally, it’s critical to implement smart sandbox management at the beginning of a development cycle when using DevOps Center. Because DevOps Center lets you integrate with Salesforce partners, you can leverage an automation tool like Prodly Sandbox Management.
Sandbox Management lets you spin up environments and populate them with current test data from production in just a few clicks. This reduces conflicts and minimizes the chances of bugs once you’ve deployed your changes to production.
In the event of a bug, you can use Sandbox Seeding to quickly seed the data you need to a hotfix environment. Then you can fix the issue and promote it back to production.
How Do I Set Up for DevOps center?
Now you know the benefits of Salesforce DevOps Center, you may be wondering how to set up for Salesforce DevOps Center. Click here to learn how to do so!
