Which Steps To Follow to Level up your Salesforce DevOps Maturity?

It is high-time that tech companies transform themselves digitally. This can be done only when companies adopt leading cloud platforms that are present in the market like Salesforce.

Salesforce enables IT organizations to deliver value to their business, albeit in a much quicker and faster way as compared to other kinds of platforms.

Once Salesforce comes into the picture, the next step forward is to adopt a modern DevOps strategy that will prove to be highly useful in increasing speed, providing more value to the business and reducing errors in production.

There are a certain number of problems that come into effect when Salesforce gets integrated with DevOps, some of which include:

  • Lack of built-in compliance enforcement
  • Collaboration with others in the same environment becomes difficult
  • No native version control or source repositories
  • The release process is unstructured

One of the major problems in DevOps implementation is the lack of collaboration tools. DevOps can turn out to be successful only when there is proper sync between the architects, admins, developers, customers and of course your business.

Each organization has a different level of maturity when it comes to DevOps process. But for achieving continuous delivery, it is very essential for companies to first improve their internal processes.

DevOps on Salesforce process usually involves the implementation of the following steps:

  1. Plan
  2.  Create
  3.  Package
  4.  Verify
  5.  Deploy
  6.  Release
  7.  Monitor

DevOps on Salesforce is usually seen as a seven-stage process with the steps Plan, Create, Package and Verify being the standard ones. The only steps that differ in the DevOps on Salesforce process include Deploy and Release. Companies need not have to worry about monitoring the process since it is completely handled by Salesforce.

There are five distinct levels of DevOps maturity which every organization, be it a Salesforce development company or a company that is just getting started with Salesforce, needs to look into, before taking the next step forward in the Salesforce with DevOps implementation process. These levels of DevOps maturity are explained in detail below:

Choose and Deploy

Changes are made as and when required in any organization, even if it’s production. These changes are made whenever they are deemed necessary and after that, they are immediately moved to another environment. This ultimately results in over-writing and finally a very low-quality of the work process. Due to these reasons, teams manage with only 2-3 software releases in a year into production.

Version Control

The version control level serves as a storehouse of external repositories. Managing branches tends to be kind of rapid and it is useful only for developers, not admins. Organizations, in spite of bringing into effect manual quality control, are able to manage only with monthly releases.

Agile Releases

This level proves to be a good intermediate goal for many companies. Release strategies are built around the stories of users and this is the result of the commitment of the organization to the agile process. The environments are kept up to date with more frequent deployments, releases are small and on-time, reviews of manual codes are reviewed with static code analysis.

Apex tests and validation are put into effect in environments all across the organization. Deployments are accumulated in pre-production, but they are still kept manual. Releasing on the prod domain is still considered a big deal.

If you are looking for DevOps Consulting Services, choose the Best DevOps Consulting Company from here.

Intelligent Automation

In this level, admins connect with developers with the help of version control and scratch orgs with the use of 3rd party tools. Automation comes into effect once there are more frequent releases and back-to-back deployments and this process continues up to the pre-production stage.

The transition from release to production becomes more dependable and predictable. However, this step is still controlled by IT. Finally, your organization has the ability to report regularly on business value delivery and on-delivery metrics, now that there are automated quality processes in place.

Continuous Delivery

Finally, the organization reaches the stage of continuous delivery and innovation into the process of production. This level of automation requires Salesforce apps to be developed in the exact way that Salesforce designs their services. There should also be full automation of quality gates.

One important thing that has to be kept in mind is that the deployment into production must not have any sort of impact on users of the already existing version. The release of the software to users must be orchestrated by the business based on the timing given on their schedules.

The most important part of DevOps maturity is the way you work with the set of tools in the internal processes. You need to choose a vendor that enables you to start at your current level, but at the same time, allows you to offer a complete solution at several stages including the maturity level.

Popular Salesforce Blogs