How to Get the Most from Your Release Management Tools
A thoughtful approach to utilizing Salesforce release management tools streamlines the DevOps pipeline and leads to secure, high-quality applications.
Why It Matters: Why source a tool if you’re not going to get all the potential benefits? Release management tools enable your team to be more productive without sacrificing quality or security.
- Inefficient processes create waste and lead to a reduced ROI for every DevOps project.
- Errors not found until after production are increasingly difficult and expensive to fix.
Here are 9 ways to see the greatest benefits from your Salesforce release management tools:
- Get a Clear Understanding of Your Release Process
- Facilitate Collaboration with Version Control
- Automate Whenever Possible
- Test Early and Often
- Work On a Unified Platform
- Frequently Analyze and Update Best Practices
- Keep Data Security and Compliance Top of Mind
- Implement Updates as Soon as They Are Released
- Document Everything
1. Get a Clear Understanding of Your Release Process
Speak with your release managers, developers, administrators, and anybody else who touches a DevOps project to learn everything you can. Advantageous updates are only possible when you have a comprehensive vision of your release process.
Ensure you have a clear understanding of your organization’s release process. Identify key milestones, approval stages, and dependencies.
Use this information to establish use cases for your release management tools.
2. Facilitate Collaboration with Version Control
Having a large development team is a great way to expedite the release of an update or application, but it is also prone to errors. Overwrites and conflicting code become increasingly possible with each additional developer.
Implement a version control system to track changes in your Salesforce configuration and code.
Using version control helps maintain a history of changes and facilitates collaboration while giving you the information you need to roll back any changes should a problem arise.
3. Automate Whenever Possible
Manual processes are more likely to result in errors. Team members tasked with performing repetitious processes get tired, glaze over, and make mistakes they might not otherwise. Automated release management tools can take many of these tasks out of your developers’ hands.
Automating repetitive tasks speeds along the DevOps pipeline while also decreasing errors and freeing up team members for more intricate tasks.
Your developers will thank you for making their jobs easier and your end users will enjoy reliable, error-free products.
4. Test Early and Often
The only way to truly know if the application working its way through your Salesforce DevOps pipeline is secure is to put it to the test. Performing these tests as early as possible reduces the amount of time and money it costs to fix errors.
Comprehensive testing must be completed before deploying changes to production.
Every additional layer of testing adds another degree of reliability to your release. Multiple rounds of testing are recommended to locate potential errors and vulnerabilities.
5. Work on a Unified Platform
Your Salesforce release management tools need to work together to provide the benefits you need. Your version control tool needs to integrate into your CI/CD pipeline as well as your static code analysis tool.
Sourcing all your release management tools from one vendor ensures they work in perfect alignment.
AutoRABIT is the only comprehensive Salesforce DevSecOps platform. You never have to worry about connectivity when all your tools are hosted in a singular environment.
6. Frequently Analyze and Update Best Practices
Everybody on your team needs to be on the same page when it comes to how they approach your Salesforce DevOps pipeline. Having a unified approach to managing releases makes it much easier to plan and troubleshoot.
Internal reviews of the processes and tactics your team uses will ensure that any unoptimized strategies will be found and addressed.
New tools are always being introduced. Best practices evolve. Stay on top of these changes so you don’t fall behind.
7. Keep Data Security and Compliance Top of Mind
Your release management tools will only provide the returns you expect if your Salesforce environment itself is functioning properly. Data breaches, malfunctions, and other security vulnerabilities will degrade your ability to utilize your tools to their full advantage.
Enforce governance policies and compliance checks during the release process to ensure your Salesforce instance adheres to organizational standards and security requirements.
This will result in the stability you need to focus on your release pipeline and guarantee the release of secure and reliable updates and applications.
8. Implement Updates as Soon as They Are Released
Software is rarely static. New updates, security patches, and expanded functionalities are constantly being introduced.
Keep abreast of new features and updates from Salesforce and any automated release management tools.
Regularly review release notes to understand how new features might impact your existing processes and make necessary adjustments. This ensures your toolset is secure and your environment offers everything your team members need to do their work.
9. Document Everything
Learning from your mistakes is the best way to grow your skills and capabilities. Performing internal process reviews at the completion of a project will provide the feedback needed to refine your DevOps approach and see the greatest results.
Automated release management tools offer detailed reporting of who made changes when and where.
Insights such as these will point out both weak points and successes in your pipeline. You can use this information to reinforce advantageous processes and reevaluate areas in need of improvement.
Next Step…
Now that you understand how to optimize the benefits seen from our Salesforce release management tools, it’s time to consider how to streamline deployments.
Read our blog, 7 Things You Need to Know About Salesforce Deployments, to learn more.
FAQs
What are the key components of a typical Salesforce release process?
Salesforce release processes start with a planning phase where release goals are defined along with an expected timeline. Development builds the actual update through coding and customizations. The testing phase can address several aspects of a project. This includes unit, integration, and user acceptance testing phases that aim to find errors so they can be fixed. A staging environment is used for final testing prior to deployment to production. Various DevOps tools can be used throughout this process to expedite these components.
What are some best practices for testing Salesforce changes before deploying to production?
A comprehensive testing strategy should be implemented that includes unit testing for individual components, integration testing to verify interactions between different modules, and user acceptance testing to validate the changes from an end-user perspective. Automated testing tools can be used to streamline the testing process and catch issues early in the development life cycle. Finally, maintaining a dedicated sandbox environment for testing offers a realistic simulation of the production environment.
