Our team members provide the best work when we enable them with useful tools and clear direction. This is a major aspect of Salesforce DevOps. However, there are such a large quantity of methods and tools that Salesforce developers can use that it can be difficult to single out the most beneficial path to DevOps success.
Automated release management is a powerful set of processes that assist developers and release managers alike in their pursuit of a streamlined DevOps pipeline.
The capabilities provided by automated release management include:
- Version control management
- Automation through continuous integration
- Robust deployment capabilities
- Powerful data migrations
- Test automation
- Comprehensive integration with Salesforce DX
- Intelligent reports
- Environment creation and management
- Administration
These tools assist team members working throughout the various aspects of a Salesforce DevOps pipeline to streamline their duties. The company sees higher ROIs, improvements in the end products, and a more pleasant working environment for everyone involved.
Plenty has been written about how these tools benefit the eventual software release, but how do they benefit the team members themselves?
Here are 8 ways automated release management helps your team achieve their Salesforce DevOps goals:
1. Facilitates Collaboration
Multi-developer teams are susceptible to certain problems. Code overwrites, poor communication, an inability to coordinate efforts on a shared project—all these issues will impact the success of the application or update within your Salesforce DevOps pipeline.
One of the most widely used tools within an automated release management platform is Version Control.
Version Control is a source code management tool and is the foundation of effective team-based development. It’s a way of managing software revisions or updates over time by splitting off individual environments so developers can work on their section of the project without impacting the main code repository.
2. Promotes Consistency
You want to be sure the products coming out of your Salesforce DevOps pipeline meet your company’s standards. Anything below these standards won’t provide the beneficial results you expect. Your team members work hard to ensure the level of quality stays high. However, any assistance you can provide will make this effort easier and more successful.
DevOps tools can be automated to produce reliable results, ensuring everything you produce meets your expectations.
Automated processes can be tailored to your needs, and then effortlessly repeated. Processes such as testing and continuous integration ensure the work your team members produce is always reliable.
3. Enables Repeatable Processes
Any confusion in your DevOps pipeline will lead to team members either becoming frustrated or guessing at which way to go. Not only does this degrade the experience of your team members, but it also creates a development process with unreliable results.
Automated release management helps instill repeatable processes which can be optimized over time.
Incorporating DevOps tools and procedures makes the planning process of a development project much easier. From there, your team knows what to expect. This allows them to perfect their tasks and use this knowledge on every applicable project moving forward.
4. Reduces Repetitive Tasks
A Salesforce development project is liable to have thousands of lines of code. This is a lot of data that needs to be managed, verified, and deployed. The process of getting this code to production includes a lot of stability and security tests, as well as other processes that take an immense amount of time when performed manually.
Automated release management takes these repetitive tasks off your team members’ hands so they can focus on more pressing issues.
Your team members’ time is important. Not only does it directly impact the cost of a development project, but it also impacts the overall productivity of your team’s efforts. Freeing them up by automating previously time consuming and repetitive tasks makes a better experience for them, and a more profitable project for the company.
5. Catches Errors
Mistakes are going to happen. This is unavoidable. Even the best programmers are liable to create errors in the code repository. And if these errors aren’t caught, they can negatively impact other areas of the project that become more costly and more difficult to fix the later they are found.
Automated testing at various stages in the DevOps process supports successful deployments and increases ROI.
Automated release management includes many tools such as static code analysis that alert team members to any errors in the code. This allows them to address these issues early on, saving them from finding errors later in the process and needing to rework features for a second time.
6. Supports Accountability
An important aspect of streamlining your Salesforce DevOps efforts is to promote accountability. This ensures you know exactly where any errors are coming from as well as who touched the code where and when.
Automated release management’s auditing capabilities ensure you can maintain ample oversight to support quality and data security.
Version control marks every update to the source code with a time stamp as well as a personal identifier, so you know who’s responsible for every change. These oversight tools promote accountability and help each team member properly perform their duties.
7. Increases Capacity
We’ve discussed how automating time-consuming tasks frees up your team members to attend to more pressing matters. However, this automation also completes these tasks much more quickly. The combination of expediting these processes while freeing up your team members increases your ability to release applications and updates in a timely manner.
Automating processes in the Salesforce DevOps pipeline increases allows you to increase your release velocity.
An ability to put out more development projects positions your company as a leader in your industry. Automated release management provides the tools and processes needed for your team members to quickly put out high quality releases.
8. Improves Confidence
The experience of your team members is important to the quality of the eventual release. Diffident, unhappy developers aren’t likely to produce consistently quality work. Providing the tools needed to properly accomplish their tasks will make for a better working situation and improve their outlook on their position.
Automated release management gives your team members everything they need to feel confident and comfortable in their roles.
Salesforce DevOps greatly benefits from automation. However, the human aspect of the production cycle is equally important. These powerful tools provide great benefits to the end users of your products, but they also make the experience of producing the applications and updates more enjoyable for your team members.