The ability to quickly introduce new applications and updates is a major advantage when positioning your business as a leader in your industry. The processes and tools used to achieve this will have a great impact on the stability, functionality, and security of your releases. DevSecOps is aimed at producing the most secure and reliable updates and applications possible.
Automated tools such as CI/CD expedite your Salesforce DevSecOps pipeline while helping your team produce secure and profitable projects.
Our team members are our greatest resource, but manual processes are time consuming, costly, and carry the potential for detrimental errors. Static code analysis, CI/CD, and other automated tools help streamline DevSecOps processes and support successful deployments.
But how does automation accomplish this? How do automated processes support the ultimate goal of every DevSecOps pipeline—a satisfied end user?
Here are 6 ways automation supports your Salesforce DevSecOps pipeline:
1. Higher Release Velocity
Customer needs are constantly evolving. The tools used by your customer-facing team members should be continuously updated to address these changing needs. The customers themselves are growing more independent and want the ability to perform many tasks themselves.
Take online banking, for example. It’s now possible to deposit checks without leaving home with the help of an application. Development projects allow a company to stay on top of necessary capabilities like this.
Introducing automation to your Salesforce DevSecOps pipeline speeds along the development processes, allowing you to increase the number of deployments per year.
More deployments mean more opportunities to increase your worth to your customers. A company that is only able to make one release every few months won’t be timely with their services. The ability to stay on top of evolving market needs positions you as a leader and leads to happier customers.
2. Reduction in Time Consuming Processes
There are certain aspects—such as writing code—that are labor intensive yet necessitate the attention of skilled team members. Other processes will be time consuming if performed manually, but repetitive. For instance, integrating lines of code from individual sandboxes into the main repository and verifying their stability involves repeated tasks. A team member is able to perform these tasks, but it takes them away from other tasks that cannot be automated due to their complexity.
Automation takes care of these repetitive tasks and frees up your team members to focus on other aspects of your Salesforce DevSecOps pipeline that will push the project forward.
CI/CD is a particularly useful tool in this regard for Salesforce development teams. These tools move lines of code into a singular repository and prepare them for production quickly, easily, and with a reduced risk of errors.
3. Faster Time to Market
We’ve discussed the speed at which market trends and needs can fluctuate. The ability to respond to these changes in real time gives you the authority of a company at the forefront of your industry. Customers learn they can look to you to meet their evolving needs. The ability to expedite a Salesforce DevOps project without sacrificing quality or security positions you as a leader.
Automation is the single greatest asset to quickly moving a project through a DevSecOps pipeline while ensuring proper stability and security.
Automated release management provides a series of tools that check the health of your code, account for potential mistakes, and make it easier for your team members to perform their duties.
4. Elimination of Errors
Mistakes can be costly. And the later they are found in the development cycle, the most expensive they become to rectify. The likelihood of these errors grows along with the number of touches your team members have on a given project. Automated tools like static code analysis provide oversight on your code the moment it is written, so any mistakes in the structure don’t impact other areas.
A reduction in errors reduces overall cost, supports successful deployments, and increases end user satisfaction.
Automation reduces the touch points and opportunities for mistakes in the building phase, integration, and deployment of a software release. The benefits of this are seen by the team members, end users, and overall ROI of the project itself.
5. Improved Data Security
Data security is a constant concern. Not only can it be extremely costly to fall victim to a predatory cybercriminal, it can also put your company in danger of falling out of regulatory compliance (depending on your industry). Data security is a multi-pronged effort, and the stability of your DevSecOps projects needs to be included in your strategy.
Automating numerous quality checks prior to deployment greatly decreases the chances of an error making it through production and creating security vulnerabilities.
DevOps procedures previously waited until the end of the pipeline to conduct security tests. Now, the DevSecOps mindset makes this a priority from the planning stage onwards. Utilizing this heightened attention with the power of automation greatly improves your data security strategy.
6. Variety of Options
There are going to be differences between every Salesforce DevSecOps environment. The tools that perfectly fit your needs might not work for someone else. The good news is that there are many options and settings that can be used to streamline and optimize your development environment.
Here are a few examples of powerful automated tools:
Static Code Analysis
Static code analysis is an automated code review process that provides real time visibility into code health. It helps reduce technical debt, catch errors as they occur, and results in higher quality and more secure code.
Continuous Integration
Continuous integration is the process of automatically integrating code from multiple developers into a single software release. This offers the ability to see how everyone’s code interacts for early feedback and bug-catching.
Continuous Delivery/Deployment
Continuous delivery is the process to get all types of changes such as features, configurations, and bug fixes into production at any time with the correct approvals. Continuous delivery takes this one step further and removes the approval stage.
Static code analysis and CI/CD aren’t the only automated tools for Salesforce DevSecOps, but they do a great job of illustrating the benefits of incorporating this technology. Automation comes with a price tag at implementation but pays for itself through the benefits discussed above.
