A Salesforce DevOps pipeline can provide great benefits to a company. The ability to produce useful applications and updates helps better serve their customers. This can come in the form of enabling customer-facing team members to provide better services or to offer the software directly to the customers themselves.
The quality of code that makes up an application or update is the single greatest factor in the success or failure of a development project.
Poor code quality can lead to bugs, data security risks, and an overall failure of integrating the product into your system. So how can you be sure your DevOps pipeline produces successful products?
Salesforce test automation is the best way to maintain consistently high-quality lines of code without dedicating a detrimental amount of team member time. Manual processes are prone to errors and can be costly. Automating these same processes helps the overall project to be more streamlined and profitable.
So how can you achieve consistently high-quality code? What types of Salesforce test automation are available to ensure the success of your DevOps projects?
Here are 7 ways you can improve code quality in Salesforce development projects:
1. Utilize Automation Whenever Possible
Salesforce test automation comes in many forms. We touched on this briefly above, but it’s worth repeating—automating manual processes reduces errors and increases data security. Repetitive processes take up a large amount of team member time. And when it comes to business, time equals money.
Automated processes assist in making a profitable DevOps pipeline, but they also contribute to a reduction in coding errors and more successful deployments.
A reduction in manual processes allows your team members to spend more time on important DevOps practices such as writing and integrating updates to the main code repository. Not rushing through multiple stages of the pipeline helps team members by allowing them to calmly address their tasks.
2. Static Code Analysis
There are many DevOps tools that will contribute to the overall success of new applications and updates. However, none will directly impact the strengthening of your code quality quite like Static Code Analysis.
Static Code Analysis provides direct insight into the health of your code from the moment it’s written.
Reducing the mistakes to be later addressed also reduces the overall cost of a Salesforce DevOps project. This is done by reducing the amount of time your team members will need to re-address previously completed aspects of a product. Doing something correctly the first time reduces any contingencies that might also need to be addressed.
3. CI/CD
Another example of Salesforce test automation are the processes of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD). CI and CD both automate essential aspects of the software product development process. They provide technical value in that they enhance the quality of code, speed of development, and overall efficiency. They also provide business value by enabling constant communication and slashing costs by eliminating repetitive tasks.
CI/CD introduces more testing stages to verify the proper structure of the lines of code that make up your DevOps project.
These additional checkpoints act as fail-safes to catch any contradictory lines of code that might have made it through the pipeline up to this stage. The additional testing guarantees successful deployments and reduces the bugs seen by end users.
4. Give Your Developers Enough Time
DevOps tools like Salesforce test automation will have a large impact on the success of the products developed by your team members. However, your team members are ultimately your most valuable resource when it comes to writing high quality code and creating stable and secure development projects.
Salesforce test automation frees your team members up to pay proper attention to their tasks and create the most stable projects possible.
Integrating the efforts of multiple developers into a singular code repository involves sorting through numerous—potentially thousands—lines of code to ensure there are no overwrites or contradictory commands. Trusting this process to CI allows your team members to continue pushing new projects forward so you can increase your release velocity without sacrificing code quality.
5. Avoid Errors with Proper Planning
There are certain things your DevOps team can do to ensure their efforts are working toward the same goal. This starts in the planning stage before anybody starts putting together lines of code for the project. Make sure everyone on the team is clear on what they need to be working on and who they can go to if a question comes up.
Clear communication and a defined hierarchy are essential to avoiding common errors in the development process.
Utilize a version control tool to help avoid errors such as code overwrites. These errors can destabilize your development project and increase the amount of time it takes to complete. And while this tool isn’t technically an example of Salesforce test automation, it works alongside these tools to create strong products.
6. Keep an Eye Toward Data Security
Improving code quality and maintaining data security standards are two sides of the same coin. Strong code supports strong data security. And keeping security as a main focal point in the development process will include an effort to maintain strong code.
Poor coding structures create data security vulnerabilities which puts businesses in regulated industries in danger of falling out of compliance.
A major aspect of a data security strategy is implementing a backup and restore tool. This tool might not directly impact the quality of your code, but it can save developer time in the instance of a data loss even which will then allow them to push projects forward instead of hurrying through previously completed lines of code.
7. Attract Experienced Team Members
We’ve mentioned the importance of educated team members. Better developers will simply produce better lines of code. The work atmosphere will have a large impact on attracting more talented applicants. Quality DevOps tooling makes the work much more pleasant to produce, which creates a positive work atmosphere.
People want to work in a place that supports their efforts. Enabling your developers with quality DevOps tools will attract more qualified team members.
Many of these tips revolve around the idea of getting your code right the first time it’s written. And whether this is through talented team members, Salesforce test automation, or anything else, it’s clear that high quality code needs to be a priority for a successful DevOps pipeline.
